Assembly Configurations

[joe.caulfield]

I went through the one week Pro/E course, and my instructor was not able to answer a question of mine. We do machine building, so there is a lot of motion and different states to a particular assembly. At home, I use Alibre, which allows you to create an assembly of say, an air-cylidner made out of two parts, the housing and the rod. I can define one configuration and call it "retracted" and another "extended" and have the air cylinder automatically extend in and out (based off of a driven dimension). When that air cylinder assembly is used in an upper level assembly, I can select one of the two states from the model tree, and the assembly updates. You can define multiple configurations (for say a linear actuator with 8 positions) and reference them in your upper level assembly. This can be scaled up and if it were a complex machine, I can take the upper level assembly, change (8) air cylinder states, and call it "Stage 1", then change states of some other assemblies, and call it "Stage 2", etc. My instructor first told me to use the drag icon to move parts, but that doesn't help checking for alignment, travel, etc (want to show machine in specific stages of an overall cycle). He then suggested going and editing assembly dimensions. That doesn't work either, I can remember "extend" and "retract" easily. Not so much if the two dimension values are .125 and 4.3138 Any suggestions on how to change states of lower level assemblies in a top level assembly?? Thanks, Joe

[AndyDeighton-di]

You can create a family table of the air cylinder and make instances called "retracted", "extended", "Stage 1", etc. based off a driven dimension. In the upper level assembly you can use Edit>Replace to swap the cylinder for different states as required. Another option is to use Pro/program to quickly help you choose different configurations of the cylinder within the upper level assembly. Alternatively, using Mechanisms you could animate the whole assembly and understand the kynematics and dynamics. In Wildfire 3.0 you can create snapshots of the different configurations and use these to quickly change from one state to another outside Mechanisms to see all your configurations, and also use these in seperate views in a drawing.

[ptc-1428410]

while placing the component use more sets for different positions. set1 for retracted set2 for extended now u want to show the position of retracted click "set enabled" for set1, make sure that set2 should not be enabled. if u want to show the position of extended set2 should be enabled, set1 should not be enabled. Venu

[DavidButz]

Reviving an old thread here, but it may be of use to someone wishing to show "states" of a machine going through its motion cycle. Pro/PROGRAM was suggested, and that can be an elegant method, but may be a bit involved for some situations. Sometimes a very direct method is to use Relations, then maybe Mapkeys to frost the cake. For example, Mystery Machine has three key states we would like to examine, 1,2,& 3. An air cylinder displacement "D", a cam angle "A", and a lever angle "L" are all independently in play. Create Parameters "D", "A", & "L" and use them to control each of these values, then create parameter "S" for stage. Now write relations: IF S==1 D=1.5 A=30 L=10 ENDIF IF S==2 D=3.25 . . etc. Now all you have to do is change the value of parameter "S" to examine the machine states. If you need to do this repeatedly and rapidly create three Mapkeys to set the value of "S", say "S1", "S2", & "S3". NOTE: In the particular case of a rotating shaft cam-controlled machine, such as an engine, only one parameter, cam angle, controls everything. In this situation you can use relations in an even simpler way: CAMANGLE = CAMANGLE + 30 IF CAMANGLE => 360 CAMANGLE = 0 ENDIF Now just Regenerate repeatedly, 12 times in this case, to watch the machine go through its cycle. Hope this is helpful to someone. David