A Function to Aid the Analysis of Free Body Diagrams and Kinematics

daryntaylor

Personally, I would love to have the ability to complete free body analysis within Onshape, something along the lines of the Autodesk's apps "Force Effect" and "Force Effect Motion" . It would be great if this functionality was available within a sketch environment, what are the thoughts on this?

andrew_troup

Given that it's so easy to recreate a sketch to go to (or from) the app from any MCAD package, it seems to me it's not going to make our design world a great deal better if OnS were to focus their resources on playing the game of "me too" for this particular task. It's a useful capability, no question, and one I would use, but I'm not sure it cries out to be integrated into OnS. At some future date, sure...

Personally, right now, I would rather they get a bit further on with putting together their (new sort of) cake, before they put too much icing on it. 

daryntaylor

I also agree that OnS shouldn't be concentrating on incorporating this functionality now, however, I've just spent a fair amount of time trying to complete both a static and dynamic analysis of a mechanism designed in OnS, the process of recreating the sketch in a separate application, together will all the necessary constraints and joints proved neither to be easy or straightforward, so I ask the question to probe whether or not having this functionality in OnS (albeit at some future point) is something the developers are considering. I also believe that having the ability to analyse a design early on in the process i.e. when sketching, is something that's been missing from CAD systems generally.