Grain direction and nesting of parts in a sheet

Greg_Witkamp

Hi,

I deal with mostly furniture parts made out of wood or some sort of composite wood product. I'm trying to find a good way of handling the grain direction of the parts so that they could easily be nested into a sheet of plywood, for example. I was initially thinking that mate connectors within the part studio would work well for this because they are their own little coordinate system that is associated with a specific part, but there isn't an easy way to copy them when a part is patterned without manually creating one for each part.  

To get around the issue of copying mate connectors, I was thinking to make featurescript that would go through all of my parts and create a mate connector for each of them.  I think this would be possible through the use of "mateConnector", however I've only spent about an hour playing with featurescript.

Thoughts?

3dcad

Do you position them manually to your sheet or do you use something like Auto Layout script?

Greg_Witkamp

Ideally, I'd like to have it sort my parts by thickness and arrange them automatically, but that's a big jump. I think the first step is to figure out how to set a mate connector consistently to each part so that the y-axis is parallel to the length of the part and the z-axis in normal to the face of the part that would be the face of the plywood. Once that is figured out, then I can worry about sort the parts and orient them on a sheet.

3dcad

Check out BOM discussion on forum, there we have tried to figure out same issue..
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/23881/#Comment_23881

Greg_Witkamp

That is similar, but my end goal is to create sheet layouts, not cut lists, that could easily be exported to dxf, or be used in an OnShape app to create machine code for CNC routers. I'd like to get around having to buy an expensive CAM software to nest and program parts.

From the other discussion, It sounds like the bounding box would be the way to go for determining which way the z-axis would go, couple that with the material parameter of each part, then the parts could be sorted by material and thickness, which is needed for nesting parts.

3dcad

Are you lookin' to have automatic optimization for nested parts? I suppose that needs a bit more than feature script..

If you have relatively simple products have you thought it so that if you create nested layout in sketch manually, extrude parts and use assembly to create product? In context editing is coming soon so that would make it easier to create toolings afterwards. Sketch export easily to dxf and you would have also part studio with part layout for app to create toolpaths.

ilya_baran

While you cannot part-pattern mate connectors, you can feature pattern them.  A custom feature (in FeatureScript) that adds a mate connector to each part based should also be doable (how hard it is depends on the requirements).  If you run into difficulties and post in the forum, we'll help

Greg_Witkamp

Automatic optimization would be great, but I know that's probably much more difficult than it sounds. A little step that would help get there would be to just lay all the parts flat on one plane equally spaced in a grid so they don't overlap, then create a sketch to project all the parts' geometry on so that sketch could be exported. This way you'd have one dxf to import instead of a hundred dxfs.

I'd like to understand how to use featurescript to add the mate connectors to all of my parts. Is there something I could look at as an example?