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Random Onshape User Challenge #1: Cropped depiction of a cylindrical component

andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
edited November 2015 in Using Onshape

 

How the Part Studio should look:




Model is to be driven entirely by the two variables named in the graphic; the cropped portions are both the same length.
Imported parts or surfaces not permitted.

ON later EDIT: the method can build the result depicted "from scratch"; it needn't be capable of modifying an existing rod.

Chamfer is optional: if included, it should be one twelfth of "#Diameter", rounded to the nearest half millimeter (or .020")

Two submissions max per user

Separate Citations for
1) simplest geometry creation
2) most unexpected concept
3) most elegant implementation
4) fewest features (as counted at the top of Part Studio feature list)

Challenge is open to users who have never been Onshape employees...
(sorry .... but employees are welcome to make informal submissions before the citations are published!)

Please share finished submissions with me but do not make them public - Message me for my email address.

Submissions close in one week from the posting date and time of this message
(hover over the date at the top of this post to see that time in your own timezone)

Comments

  • matthew_menardmatthew_menard Member Posts: 96 ✭✭✭
    edited November 2015
    Is the challenge to model what is seen in the image, defined by "#Cropped_length" and "#Diameter", or to take a rod of any length and "#Diameter" and then shorten it to "#Cropped_length" in the style shown?  Thanks for the input, looking forward to seeing what people come up with.
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited November 2015
    @matthew_menard 
    Good question. I intended the former, and fortuitously, that's how the first (dazzling!) submission has interpreted it.

    ON EDIT: your interpretation would certainly be more useful, but I imagine the methods which will emerge from the challenge could relatively easily be applied to the real-life situation you describe.
  • matthew_menardmatthew_menard Member Posts: 96 ✭✭✭
    Thank you for the clarification.  I finished my model in the way you intended and was just wondering if I had it right.  Do you think you will have time to compile the entries and give a rough breakdown of modeling approaches?  I'm always very interested in seeing how others approach different problems and like to incorporate more efficient modeling techniques into my repertoire.
  • joris_kofmanjoris_kofman Member Posts: 59 ✭✭
    I sent you a message as well, I think we all look forward to seeing what people come up with.
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited November 2015
    Thank you for the clarification.  I finished my model in the way you intended and was just wondering if I had it right.  Do you think you will have time to compile the entries and give a rough breakdown of modeling approaches?  I'm always very interested in seeing how others approach different problems and like to incorporate more efficient modeling techniques into my repertoire.
    That's the plan.
    The promptness and pace of entries so far puts me in mind of the famous line in Jaws, when he sees the size of what he's dealing with for the first time (the famous "Bigger boat" soliloquy), so I just might have a shark by the tail....
  • brucebartlettbrucebartlett Member, OS Professional, Mentor, User Group Leader Posts: 2,137 PRO
    Hi @andrew_troup, do you think it might be worth making a team for the submission's, then if model's are shared to the team with the "Can edit" we can all do a rollback and see how the model was created without having to do a copy. 




    Engineer ı Product Designer ı Onshape Consulting Partner
    Twitter: @onshapetricks  & @babart1977   
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited November 2015
    That's a great idea, I think. Can the team be all Onshape Users, I wonder? Or can I set up a team people can join at will, without my doing anything more?

    If not, (and if the boat doesn't get swamped with submissions - cross fingers!), I was planning to copy a representative sample of them as renamed tabs to a single public document, so that people would only have to make a single copy in order to inspect the methods. That would also permit the judging panel (ha!) annotating or drawing attention to interesting but non-obvious aspects of particular models, without munging the original files.
  • brucebartlettbrucebartlett Member, OS Professional, Mentor, User Group Leader Posts: 2,137 PRO
    As admin of the team you would have to add the email address of those who want to submit rather than sharing your email. I don't think you can set the team to allow anyone to join. 
    Engineer ı Product Designer ı Onshape Consulting Partner
    Twitter: @onshapetricks  & @babart1977   
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Thanks @brucebartlett
    If no-one comes up with a better plan, I'll stick with the single public doc approach.
    It would make the result available to all interested parties, in perpetuity.
  • joris_kofmanjoris_kofman Member Posts: 59 ✭✭
    maybe the link to the best solutions could be marked as an answer to this thread, then it would be easy to find. (You see I hope a lot of people will participate and this thread get totally out of hand)
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    @joris_kofman
    That's a really ingenious idea.
    You have my warm thanks (and my permission to remind me forcefully, if I have forgotten in a week's time)
  • matthew_menardmatthew_menard Member Posts: 96 ✭✭✭
    Shared my model with you Andrew, thanks again for organizing this. 
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    maybe the link to the best solutions could be marked as an answer to this thread, then it would be easy to find. (You see I hope a lot of people will participate and this thread get totally out of hand)
    Actually, @joris_kofman
    Now that I think about it:
    in order to do that I would have to modify a Delorean and travel back in time, in order to click on a different button ("Ask a Question" rather than "New Discussion") when I set up the topic.

    What I could do instead is set up a new topic entitled "RANDOM ONSHAPE USER CHALLENGE #1: Citations and Link to submissions", and a link to that topic at the end of this topic, and vice versa at the beginning of that topic.
  • joris_kofmanjoris_kofman Member Posts: 59 ✭✭
    @andrew_troup but then we need the 3d sketching and routing capabilities in onshape first, how else are you going to draw that flux capacitor?
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Might have to bite the bullet and splash out on the nearest commercial equivalent and modify it to suit:

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/36/GE_Turboencabulator_pg_1.jpg
    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dc/GE_Turboencabulator_pg_2.jpg

    Modelling that could be the next random challenge :)
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited November 2015
    Thanks to all who have submitted models.

    As the deadline approaches I'm starting to sort through the approaches.
    There's an interesting variety, and I will try to summarise the high points to save everybody having to dissect every model (which will be made public, in the form of a metric document and an inch one, with each submitted studio as a separate tab)

    My summary will be on a tab in each document. 
    I'm not sure what the most durable and universal format would be - probably .pdf , but I'm open to suggestions)

    There's one suggestion in my "specification" no-one has yet nailed - but remember, you're allowed two submissions!
  • joris_kofmanjoris_kofman Member Posts: 59 ✭✭
    @andrew_troup which specification is that?
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited November 2015
    @joris_kofman - From the OP :

    <<Model is to be driven entirely by the two variables named in the graphic; the cropped portions are both the same length.
    Imported parts or surfaces not permitted.

    The method can build the result depicted "from scratch"; it needn't be capable of modifying an existing rod.

    Chamfer is optional: if included, it should be one twelfth of "#Diameter", rounded to the nearest half millimeter (or .020")>>
  • joris_kofmanjoris_kofman Member Posts: 59 ✭✭
    edited November 2015
    I hope that if you re-visit the design that I submitted and set the diameter to 20 mm you will see that the chamfer dimension is 1.5 mm and for a diameter of 21 mm it is 2.0 mm. (wait a bit for the formula to update)

    Is that not in keeping with the rules set out in the post?
    You did not specify that the minimum chamfer should always be 0.5 mm, just that it should be rounded.
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Sorry, Joris, now that I think back carefully and inspect your model again, I recall that I actually did notice that you had complied with that when you submitted it, but forgot to note it, and relied on my notes when I was checking back on this some days later.

    Again, apologies!


  • matthew_menardmatthew_menard Member Posts: 96 ✭✭✭
    I made a slight tweak to my model, that may or may not take into account more of your criteria.  Would I be able to use that as my second submission?
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    I made a slight tweak to my model, that may or may not take into account more of your criteria.  Would I be able to use that as my second submission?
    Sure thing, the close-off is still a day away.
    If anyone wants to resubmit, please let me know if it's to be considered alongside, or instead of, a current submission.
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    OK, submissions are closed.

    Thanks a lot to all participants: there have been (from memory) around ten submissions from seven Onshape users, which is great, and it's a fertile crop of ideas and methods.

    It will take me a day or two to collate the methods and document a few of the more interesting and useful revelations.
    I'll start a new thread when there's something for the forum to look at and discuss.

    I was intrigued by the fact that ALL the submissions which used variables to quantify the chamfer size used "lookup" to prefix any variable name wherever it appeared in the formula for the chamfer.

    I'd love to know how people knew about this. It was news to me. It occurred to me possibly the Onshape app was either suggesting this, or inserting it automatically, but I can't get it to duplicate this for me, so I guess that's not it. 

    The strange thing is, that (at least in simple cases)  the expressions seem to work just fine without it.
  • brucebartlettbrucebartlett Member, OS Professional, Mentor, User Group Leader Posts: 2,137 PRO
    I was intrigued by the fact that ALL the submissions which used variables to quantify the chamfer size used "lookup" to prefix any variable name wherever it appeared in the formula for the chamfer.

    I'd love to know how people knew about this. It was news to me. It occurred to me possibly the Onshape app was either suggesting this, or inserting it automatically, but I can't get it to duplicate this for me, so I guess that's not it. 

    The strange thing is, that (at least in simple cases)  the expressions seem to work just fine without it.
    App changes to this automatically. @ilya_baran could most likely tell us why. 
    Engineer ı Product Designer ı Onshape Consulting Partner
    Twitter: @onshapetricks  & @babart1977   
  • ilya_baranilya_baran Onshape Employees, Developers, HDM Posts: 1,173
    @brucebartlett This is actually a bug at the interaction of copying tabs/workspaces and how we deal with variables internally. It's already fixed on our development branch and you'll see the fix the next time we do an update.
    Ilya Baran \ VP, Architecture and FeatureScript \ Onshape Inc
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Ah, mystery solved. That's why it didn't happen in any of my tests, but happened in ALL of the submissions (once I'd copied them, in the form of Part Studio tabs, to my summary document)
    Thanks, @ilya_baran, you're a champ.


  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Apologies for a week having elapsed, with still no results announced, and a clarification on why I have not simply posted the models in the meantime: 

    There were many ingenious entries, and some of the ingenuity is not obvious, taking some digging before anything valuable is exposed.

    It seems to me it would save a lot of wasted effort for others, now and in the future, for me to do the preliminary digging, and share that, rather than putting all the models out first and have other busy people spending time duplicating the same menial and repetitive labour.

    This is particularly true on the topic of rounding the chamfer values.
     

    Several people did this in a not very obvious but very ingenious way, in one case using multiple variables containing cascading calculations.

    But the above-mentioned bug when workspaces are copied, caused these formulae to be translated (in the public document) into more complex syntax involving "Lookup" functions, making the thinking more difficult to follow.

    So I'm correcting the results of that bug in the model I will be posting, as well as documenting how those formulae work.

    I am also "testing" the models by changing the parameters (in a consistent way for all models) and documenting (with screenshots) how well they cope. 

    It seems to me that process will do justice to the effort and intelligence applied to the submissions, and make the resulting insights available to the maximum number of present and future users.

    I'm back in the office now and clearing my backlog and hope to have something to show you all within the next couple of days.
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,584 ✭✭✭✭✭

    FOLLOW-UP CHALLENGE ANNOUNCEMENT

    (I'll start another forum thread laying out the results of the first Challenge, within the next day)

    OK, people, I've just about finished taking the models apart and seeing what made each one tick, and documenting what I found to save everyone else some time.... It was pretty interesting to see the different methodologies, and yet there were some striking similarities in some aspects of the outcomes. 

    What nobody happened to submit (and I'm a bit surprised) was a model which looked like the sample provided, AND where the two 'broken' ends fitted together when the half-shafts were butted. (That was NOT a challenge requirement, so it doesn't affect the results)

    Most of them would look from the outside as though they (nearly) did, as this shows :



    However sectioning reveals that they really do not fit at all :


    And here's one way of trying to explain why: (note that the "bow tie" is the edge of the cut face.
    NOTE that it does not coincide with the silhouette of that face, shown in alternation when the
    cursor moves over the face. They need to coincide, and the bow tie needs to be symmetrical,
    for the shapes to fit together)


    And here's another way of looking at it (because it's a bit difficult to demonstrate : 



    So here's the follow up Random Challenge #1.1:


    Model a shaft break which looks just like the (OP) sample for Challenge #1,
    but where the half shafts are identical, AND butt perfectly together.


    Please arrange things so the FRONT view corresponds to the OP sample orientation

    For ease of model comparability, please model a shaft diameter of 25mm or 1 inch, a gap of 12mm or 1/2", and a chamfer of 2mm or 0.080"



    No need for a variable-driven model, no need to tolerate re-sizing, no rounding of chamfer size to preferred dimensions. 

    Just a pure geometric challenge.

    Entries close one week from the date and time of this post
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