Configurations and identical parts

brucebartlett

I have a project which I am using configurations in the main part studio. This works great but only about 1/4 of the parts are changing with the configuration change but the configuration repeats the other 3/4 of identical parts with no indication. Is there a logical way here to use the default parts and not use the identical repeats or a way to automate this?

With this same part studio, I have parts that do not change in size but do change in position is there any trick to get around this when dropping into an assembly and group mating? 

I am wondering how others are dealing with this when doing drawings and assemblies. Do you choose the default part to add properties and do the drawing with this and making sure this is selected in the assembly?   

konstantin_shiriazdanov

There definetely need some part property for such cases - for example "Non configurable" so user can tag non configurable parts explicitly, and see this tag in the assembly insertion dialog and an icon of non configured part in the assembly tree. Currently as you said you should keep in mind to use only one configuration of the part everywhere, or set the same properties for all configurations of that part (but in bom it still would be two different instances)

bradley_sauln

@brucebartlett I'd be curious to take a look at this if you want to share it. For the first situation where you have parts not changing I've been able to get around this by removing the unchanging parts from the configured part studio (this may not be possible due to design intent which I also understand) and placing them in their own. I then combine both in an assembly with the choice to do an in-context edit if I do need to keep any design aspects in mind.

In the second situation, this will probably be solvable with assembly configurations. The trick right now is to prevent instancing in the part studio. If placement is important you can experiment with what I suggested above in terms of separating the parts but then configure a sketch or mate connector that drives part placement when changing configurations in an assembly. https://cad.onshape.com/documents/bd7a22090a9000c577f16178/w/1d7a24e00d9547000bc5572b/e/d9819ef6978a1defc0a84c2e



As a side note to @konstantin_shiriazdanov, keep in mind that this is a Part Studio configuration so it is very difficult to track individual parts and mark them as non-configurable

bradley_sauln

@brucebartlett I did notice that you can't configure the origin entity for a mate connector in the Part Studio at this time (I've made our team aware of that) but take a look at how I got around that in the public document I linked above.

brucebartlett

Thanks @bradley_sauln this is an interesting way of using the mate connectors to get assembly positions based on configurations, definitely food for thought. In my case, it is not making sense to have a different part studio for the unchanging parts but I can see that it may be worth considering the structure so as non-changing parts don't end up with a multitude of unused configurations and having the risk of the wrong configuration being chosen. 

I haven't tested this yet but one idea could be to add a configed delete on the non-default config for the non-changing parts, then we get a fail in the assembly for all but the default part.  

bradley_sauln

Ooh, that would be very interesting. I am actively in a project now where this discussion is relevant so let me dig into that approach as well.