Designing An Enclosure - Parts, Part Studios and Assemblies. Oh my!

alan_evans

Hi all, I am new to OnShape and to parametric design in general.  I took several drafting classes back in 199<mumbles> and so I am familiar w/ mechanical and architectural drawing.  I actually went online and found a bunch of the kinds of drawings we did in class and reproduced them myself.  That was fun.

Now I am trying to model an enclosure for a little Frequency Counter kit that's available on eBay.  I intend to 3D print it.  I figured one of the best ways to go about this would be to model the enclosure then derive or <insert parametric design term> the enclosure from that model.

I modeled the board in one part studio then created another part studio and used the derive tool.  I have done most of the drawing and it had gone well.  But I modeled the board in such a way that some of the components are individual parts in a part studio.  The derived part studio now contains all of those parts also.  How can I group or do something to them so that the entire part studio functions as one?  I would really like to just hide the entire frequency counter instead of having to select the individual components.  (Though sometimes it is nice to hide everything BUT one component.)

Also, I decided that I want to put a 9V battery in the enclosure.  It turns out there are already 12938109283 9V battery models in OnShape so I thought I would use one of those.  But I am not sure how to bring that in and then set it up in some kind of relation to my existing model.  Assembly?  I tried to and used a couple of mates and planar relationship and that got me most of the way there...  Again what is the best way to proceed?  Assembly with Frequency Counter and battery then derive?

Best practice question?  So most of the design is based on a sketch of the PCB.  In building things like the standoffs and drill holes for, should I go all the way back to this sketch or is it sufficient to use a circle from the extrude or some such?

My Document

9V Battery

Representative eBay Listing for the board

Thank you,
-Alan

john_mcclary

Have you tried Boolean-Union in the board's part studio. That should combine everything into a solid object, assuming there is no zero-length errors or anything while merging.

Derived is kind-of a last resort function as it tends to be very slow.

You may find it better to insert the board into an assembly, then make your case "in-context" in a new part studio

OR, just model the cover directly inside the board's part studio is also a good option.

owen_sparks

Also have a look at @Jake_Rosenfeld 's featurescript for simplifying PCBs.