Assembly interference checker

brucebartlett

I 've  just got in trouble for making a change and not considering all configurations and ranges of motion, hence it brings me here because I'd love to see an assembly interference checker in Onshape to help stop these drama's. With the stability of the Onshape mates and the ease at which you can create limits I think this could be done while cycling parts/sub assemblies through their degrees of freedom. 

I'd love to hear if other require the same similar tool, there may already be a feature request.

jackson_king

@brucebartlett, you can count me in on that request!

3dcad

@brucebartlett
I agree, but I would like to set certain parts into inspection and then run the check within motion limits. My problem is that nails do interfere with wood and that's ok   Or maybe exclude certain parts by their nature, this would need some checkbox into part description.

emerson_bottero

In solidworks we have to ignore all interferences from nuts in sheet metal or design the bolts with a smaller diameter. 5.2 for M6 for example. Is the same problem @3dcad has with nails.

john_kuyper

I would love to see an interference checker as well.  It would be cool if you had an option to check all degrees of freedom.  This option would cause OnShape to check the current position, then move one constraint to a limit, check again, move another constraint, check again, and so on...
It would be even more powerful to take tolerances into account.  Not only would parts be moved, but the parts would be changed to their maximum / minimum dimensions and checked for interferences.  Of course, this would require tolerances on all OnShape model dimensions.  It would probably take a lot of time as well - but that is part of the beauty of cloud computing...

I have always thought it would be cool to have a special type of solid that would be automatically excluded from interference checks.  This special solid would be applied to threads, nails, rivets, etc...  It could even be handled specially in a drawing (shown as a dashed line, for instance).

ISPTUSA

Not sure if this request has progressed or not.  Just reading through people's comments I see that there are a lot of add on requests to go with the interference checker.  Can we please just be asking for a regular no frills assembly interference checker for now?  I just want something simple that works and the options can come later.  If you want to check the part in different states then I would expect you'd get what you need using suppression or making adjustments to your motion mates.

Jake_Rosenfeld

If you guys are interested, I wrote a "Find Overlaps" Custom feature a while ago:
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/4ef9d7bf5c04de6c159e6fb0/w/50103cbdb65f20d04d6f68f1/e/90d38986c85bcf0f32574062

You can use this by pressing the + in that document to add the custom feature to your toolbar.

The workflow here would be to make a new part studio in context or your assembly, use the feature, uncheck "use entire part studio" and then select all the ghosted in-context parts.  If you also check "keep overlaps as new parts", you will get a nice view that looks like this once you commit your feature, showing where the overlaps occurred:

owen_sparks

That's nifty
Is this a glimpse into the future 
Owen S

Jake_Rosenfeld

Whatever solution we come up with will be a lot more seamless than this

This is just a workaround I coddled together a few months ago.  I expect that the performance won't be very good on large assemblies, in fact the regeneration time will grow quadratically in the number of selected parts.