Fastened Mate

lonnie_1

Is  the offset check box shown in the help file for a fastened mate been removed?
It does not show up in the dialog box for me.

jakeramsley

Hi Lonnie,

This was new functionality that we decided wasn't ready to be released yet and held it back to get some additional work on it.  We made an error releasing the documentation for it before the feature.  It's something that we hope to release soon.

You can read a previous thread on it for more information:
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/3245/

jakeramsley

Hi Lonnie,

This was new functionality that we decided wasn't ready to be released yet and held it back to get some additional work on it.  We made an error releasing the documentation for it before the feature.  It's something that we hope to release soon.

You can read a previous thread on it for more information:
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/3245/

lonnie_1

Thanks, I guess i should have searched first.

jakeramsley

After the recent maintenance this morning, we now have the ability to do offset mating in the mates themselves.  Users can now specify a distance in the x, y, and z to offset when creating a fasten mate.  Likewise, other mates will have similar offsets based on their degrees of freedom.

3dcad

After playing a while with mate connectors they are making sense more and more. With offset fastened mate is very fast and powerfull connector. 

This is actually something I would add to Geomagic wishlist if there was such.. Great work OnShape team!

andrew_troup

A few things I like about the OnS mate connector concept

1) The fact that connectors are a durable addition to the part, reflecting design intent. I mean that they remain intact even when assembly mating scheme needs wholesale revision. The user is gently encouraged to think ahead, about the design intent of the part within the assembly, not as an isolated piece.

2) The avoidance of overconstraint typical in other packages, where lots of people routinely use 3 face to face (or plane) mates, each locking down 3 degrees of freedom, resulting in 9 out of 6 dof being constrained. This is why flipping a single mate alignment in (say) Solidworks can be time-consuming, especially in someone else's model; part reorientation in OnS is trivial. Over-constraint also impedes assembly performance and reliability

3) Radical reduction in number of mates needed, without resorting to the complexity of highly evolved packages where even moderate reduction requires specialised mate types.

4) They seem to me to have potential to do duty in other roles: probably as coordinate systems, possibly in lieu of reference points and reference axes, maybe even sharing attributes with manipulation triads. They might come in different 'flavours' (and colours?) to avoid role confusion, but a consistent way of depicting and deploying might be a welcome simplification

5) It seems conceptually elegant to separate the "noun" part of a mate (this is what we want mated) from the "verb" part (this is how we want it mated).

There are other things I liked, but they escape me at present.