Laser Measure (New Custom Feature!) 🆕

MichaelPascoe

Laser Measure (New Custom Feature!)

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/11b3c35c86c54ad322793270/w/912fd62e61faa3b3e8c9412e/...

Laser Measure allows you to:

• Measure a distance based on a direction.
• Find distances to unkown entities. (Example: last entity in a pattern)
• Save measure line as a curve for downstream references.
• Create a variable of the measured distance.

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Laser Measure - Tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoV_s16p5-A

xTimRice

Very neat!

glen_dewsbury

Nice one Michael

MichaelPascoe

ty   It's a pretty specific feature, but I needed something like it the other day. It's mainly intended for variable feature patterns.


(For anyone who isn't familiar with variable feature patterns, see the video tutorial above for an example.)

bryan_lagrange

@MichaelPascoe This would be cool to demonstrate at an upcoming user group meeting.

S1mon

@MichaelPascoe

This looks interesting, but I'm trying to imagine what problems this solves that some of the other measuring Featurescripts can't do? I feel like Konstantin's Measure Value and the now built-in measure to variable functionality have a lot of options to project measurements on to lines or Mate connectors. I've definitely gotten myself into situations where I had to create a helper sketch to get a measurement I needed, so I'm sure there are holes. Without going through all the other tools again myself, can you explain what's special here? Thanks.

MichaelPascoe

@S1mon

Measure Value is my default for any measuring, even before I use the built in . You can pretty much do anything you need with a helper sketch and a normal measuring tool.

Helper sketches are a pain to work with inside variable feature patterns. The "Keep laser line" option, makes it less of a pain when trying to get measure lines to reference inside the pattern.

Referencing the last entity in a pattern can be tricky. You can do it with a Sketch, Extrude up to next, and a mate connector; Laser measure can reference it in one step, but it is still shooting from the hip. I could imagine an option in Linear pattern plus by @Evan_Reese: "Create reference point" which would allow the user to select a point to reference from the original entity, this would create a robust point at the same position on the last patterned entity for downstream features to reference. So it wouldn't matter if the quantity of pattern changes, the reference point will still be good.

MichaelPascoe

@bryan_lagrange, sounds good to me. Custom features are a fun topic.

bryan_lagrange

Thank you @MichaelPascoe