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assemblies losing their mate features
kees_bijker
Member Posts: 122 ✭✭
So in sketches we have constraints, and they will tell us if the sketch is fully constraint or not. When it is not constraint the lines are blue and the name of the sketch in the feature list has a blue icon.
In assemblies you use mate features to fix parts to other parts. But when you change a part in the original sketch, you loose the mate feature and it becomes red.
When you have many parts and many mate features, this becomes tedious to go and look for them, even if you have given them names.
Question is, would it be at all possible to show us we have lost mate features, like with non constraint sketches turning blue and having an icon in the feature list, to appear in the assembly list somewhere or on the tab even in the shape of a big red icon.
This would make it far easier to react in time and not to make x number of changes and have a whole less to clean up afterwards.
Or is there an easier way?
Comments
Well, they do become red in the feature tree. Though even then, I sometimes find it hard to figure out where they belonged and what exactly they did. Naming them when creating them is extremely important.
It would be very nice, they had a built-in memory of what was before they got lost and this could be recalled on the press of a button, and if it only was for visialisation purposes, to help resolving them precisely. For example could there be a marker lighting up the location of their now lost reference, just so we could make a better guess what to look for.
It really depends on the sort of mates you want to manage. One approach can be to add explicit mate connectors in the part studios. That way if some upstream sketch or geometry change makes the MC break, you see it in the part studio, and can fix it there without having to switch into the assembly to discover the issue.
It also really depends on the types of mates that you're trying to manage. For some assemblies, mating a bunch of parts origins together can make a lot of sense. These MCs can be created in ways that aren't very dependent on geometry. For things like hardware inserted in holes, you're more likely to just use implicit mates in assembly mode along with replicate.
I also find that it's very hard to manage assemblies and mates without taking the time to name all or most of the mates and potentially putting them in folders. It's tedious and should be automated by Onshape, but until that happens, I try to name mates on any serious assembly that I need to maintain for any length of time.
As @martin_kopplow alludes to, you can look at how things were working before it broke and use that to help debug things. That's one of the superpowers of Onshape. View in repair was a kinda cool addition, but I still often open up two windows side by side with one of the last working version and one of the current workspace that I'm trying to fix.
I think an equivalent to the part studio "repair" tool would help, although you can do this "manually" by opening a previous state of your assembly in a separate window and double clicking on the mate (and/or mate connectors) there to see what it used to be attached to.
Don't forget you can also filter the assembly tree to show only mates or items with errors (combine them to filter mates with errors) to quickly find all your mates with errors (although it also returns ones with suppressed items)
I am not yet very familiar with explicit MC's so I do not know how it shows in the part studios when they break. I would like you to show me some example as I feel I am missing this insight. I do sometimes ask myself what are the benefits of those explicit mate connectors you can assign to parts in the part studios, but I kind of only use them for things like parts that do not have their own mate connector in the right place, like a spring produced from a helix, or when you want to fix a part to origin with a specific orientation.
Yes this is what we have to do when we are in that situation that more then one thing broke before we noticed. It is very tedious though and labour intensive. If the assembly tab would show an icon like the feature list does in our part studio, we would be alerted straight away that something we did just made a mate connector break!
This is what I am after, like some early warning system as we have with our sketches in the feature list in part studios.
Your example of adding a mate connector to a spring in a part studio, is an "explicit" mate connector. Explicit mate connectors show up in the feature tree. They will turn red if they are missing their references. "Implicit" are the ones created "on the fly" while mating in assembly mode.
It's also possible to create explicit mate connectors in an assembly, but those are only available in that assembly or if that subassembly gets inserted into another assembly. Those explicit mate connectors do not follow the parts to other independent assemblies.
Ok that makes sense, but only for the surface changes that this explicit mate relates to. If the other side of the mate has lost its connection due to a change in the other part which had an implicit mate connector, what would happen to the explicit mate connector in your feature list in the part studio? I think nothing but maybe I am wrong.