Welcome to the Onshape forum! Ask questions and join in the discussions about everything Onshape.
First time visiting? Here are some places to start:- Looking for a certain topic? Check out the categories filter or use Search (upper right).
- Need support? Ask a question to our Community Support category.
- Please submit support tickets for bugs but you can request improvements in the Product Feedback category.
- Be respectful, on topic and if you see a problem, Flag it.
If you would like to contact our Community Manager personally, feel free to send a private message or an email.
Options
Assembly Sketches and Mates to Sketches
marc_koeppel
Member Posts: 3 ✭
I'm pretty new to OnShape and have just started trying it out, but I can't find a way to create a sketch in an assembly, and then I would want to mate to this path I have created. I use this a lot to define a motion path for dynamic items, or robots. Also is there not an assembly pattern as well. I would put these items high on my list of needed features along with 2D drawings, and hole wizard (or feature library). I assume all of this is in the pipeline, but are there expected release dates? I have seen other forums on similar subjects, but expected release dates are not mentioned. I would say that a product road map would be very helpful for those wanting to try out new features as they become available. I would expect most users can't just be sitting around waiting and checking for updates.
3
Comments
I personally think it would not make sense to try to reproduce attributes of the radically different conventional model, because that would involve the risk of "falling between two stools"
A very imperfect analogy would be of a country with a highly participatory democracy (binding referenda and such) deciding to publish a timeline for the passing of future legislation.
Of course Ons guys could keep all this behind closed doors and create all the functions and features without asking anything from anyone. But I think they have chosen a much much better way listening to people who are interested in their software at this early stage and already thinking / learning how to use Ons when it's ready.
I remember few years ago when Alibre added a bunch of features with every update, then they had this voting system for new features and the most voted were: 'Fix all the bugs' and 'Usability before new features'. I'm glad they did.
I would rather wait 2 years for a significantly better product than having tomorrow just another cad. We already have a bunch of decent cad packages available so I don't understand what's the rush here (among us who are not working in Onshape).
When I am at my day job I am constantly running into problem areas; crashes, simple changes to an existing released product with out messing with the release models, or make a mistake and want to step back a few hours, etc, etc, and I find myself thinking Onshape will fix all these issues. But Onshape at this point in time could not possibly be implemented in this business, however given time and a full feature list and improved internet infrastructure we might see the move across.
Twitter: @onshapetricks & @babart1977
I use the same points to create Mate Connectors linked to the components. The first part in the assembly is the Skeleton Part which displays it's Mate Connectors...
Then I can bring in the other components...
Then I can Fastened Mate the component parts into place! I Fix the Skeleton Part in place at the Origin also.
Now my steel tubes that don't touch each other are in the proper locations and I can Hide the Skeleton Part to not see the "Orb"!
Thoughts @lougallo , @traveler_hauptman , & @andrew_troup ?!
Maybe it would be good to have some sort of streamlined input dialog (or other front end) for creating multiple mate connectors "in space"?
I suppose one challenge is capturing design intent. It's not at all future-proof, if it's just raw data, eg distances and angles
Another consideration: It seems to me (from my standpoint of relative ignorance) that one of the challenges of any sort of 3D input is being able to orient oneself in that space.
Occasionally someone comes up with something which really rocks. I recall Microstation nailed another aspect of this problem decades ago (possibly with something called "Intellisketch"?) - as a way of routing pipes, cables, ropes (around sheaves) - any 3D sketch involving alternating lines and tangent arcs at arbitrary angles.
I think you're trying a little too hard. I think one can keep the studio for top-down design and assemblies for BOM/sub-assemblies (ie actual manufacturing assemblies).
For your simple example above, I would add part studio mate connectors at whatever nominal locations make sense.
I worked up an example with a couple approaches embedded. https://cad.onshape.com/documents/14820c8e9ed54f9a9dd4d5b7/w/bac1541a0c534a67b0234b2f/e/75382cd2c08342baa6330ba3
There's a lot of possible approaches. Here's what I did:
There's more ways to do this. I believe they are fully generalizable. I started working up an example with imported off-the-shelf tubing, cut to fit the design sketch, but while it works fine it the feature tree organization and annotation capabilities of Onshape are so poor that it was difficult to follow so I switched to the simpler, more contrived example above.
The BOM problems created by using copy-part features in a part studio is a known problem discussed elsewhere. I'm pretty sure adding the ability to label/differentiate between copy->new_part and copy->new_instance is in their issues list.
Hope that helps.
Hey! That URL address for an image really works slick!! My "trying to hard" is to end up assembling final structures easily. The above structure ends up here! Nice to know these a still hanging above the ball park!
Keep up the gr8 work.
Dave