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In-Context & Top Level Assy

billy2billy2 Member, OS Professional, Mentor, Developers, User Group Leader Posts: 2,068 PRO
edited March 2017 in General
2017-3-27 12:35 created

Setting 1st component in top assembly

Added a new component cyclonic to top assy and moved pump to a lower rack shelf trying to lower the center of gravity:




This is the simple structure, there's no top level layout, each pipe has a layout:




I'm worried that this drawing tree doesn't show enough details how this is being put together. There's no layout indicators and no reasoning about how the references are suppose to behave.



Add another pipe run between the pump and the cyclonic. I'm picking the top level origin for the part's origin and recommend this highly for now:


My in-contexts are assembled by coordinates for now and locked down.



Creating the in-context trajectory is fast. I'd call this a layout between the pump & cyclonic:


For this pipe run I'm sweeping only a surface. I don't need the inner wall or end plates. I'm only interested in claiming space for these pipe runs and 1 surface does the job with the least amount of geometry.

I'm also using 2 sketches to achieve my 3D trajectories which seems to behave very robustly.



With in-context it won't take long to add all components with pipe runs:




Give the pump a little more room by face moving the rack shelves upward (remember the rack is imported):




All components are tied to the rack and update their positions:




Updating contexts fixes everything. Thinking an "update all contexts" might be a nice button:




Now I can focus on component placement and let the piping figure itself out:







I'm still trying to figure how to detail this structure so the next guy working on this can follow the structure and be productive in a short amount of time. If you're going to collaborate on a project, which I'm hoping for, I think everyone needs to be using the same playbook.

I'm also interested in the BOM and wonder how it'll look after all the partstudios & sub assemblies are finalized. I still need to add the elbows and fittings to punch the design out with details.

I've also tied this blog post to my new website on Digital Ocean. My new site is a private server running nginx that can handle 10,000 hits/second. This means if 10,000 of you can click on a link at the same time. Only a few of you will get a 403 server not responding. So what do I think of Digital Ocean? It's freak'n fast.



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