Creo Style Family Table for Gridfinity Bins?

[Airfix]

Recently I've been downloading Gridfinity boxes from makers spaces as a .stp file as a starting point and then modifying them in Creo to create the container I want on our 3D printers.  However I'll get halfway through designing a container and then decide instead of it being a 4x6 container if I make it a 4x8 container I can fit in this extra widget.  

This requires me to download a whole new .stp file and start the Creo process from scratch.  It sure would be nice if these Gridfinity files were parametric.

I've been racking my brains to think of the best way to great a parametric Gridfinity set of bins.

1) I'm assuming a family table is the best way to create a parametric set of bins?

2) Does anybody already have a Gridfinity  family table they could share with me?

3) Filling in the corners between two sets of bins or filling in the edge corner details will be the difficult part.  I'm guessing I could do that with a bunch of relations within the family table.

I appreciate any tips or tricks from Creo users that have tried this and what you learned about the best approach..

For those that don't know what Gridfinity is here is a YouTube short showing you the concept:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7BkqQXnJdK8

Here is the Gridfinity design spec:

https://gridfinity.xyz/specification/

Any thoughts or help appreciated.

Cheers,

Airfix

[tbraxton]

I would not use family tables for this. If you want the designs in Creo then build a model with relations and use it to generate whatever size you need based on the geometry of a unit cell. There are online gridifinity generators that take input and then create the 3D model, you can readily replicate this within Creo. Start with a unit cell definition for each type of design i.e. base plate and then use the unit cell to expand an array to fill the desired footprint managed with relations. I also think that UDF functionality may be useful for options to be added to a base model (screw mounting on a base plate).

Check out this thread where there are models that employ a step and repeat approach to generate a "grid". You should be able to leverage some of the techniques shown in these models to make your parametric models to grow/shrink as needed.

https://community.ptc.com/t5/3D-Part-Assembly-Design/Creo-Parametric-Community-Challenge-2-Isogrid-on-a-Curved/td-p/902365 

[Airfix]

I was thinking family tables because it would be easy to turn on/off certain features like the magnet recesses but it would likely require a huge table which can be difficult to manage.

I had a passing thought about using a UDF which I've used in the past to generate the gear teeth from an involute sketch but it has been years since I created that UDF.

Those isogrids are a difficult problem to model then more difficult when you think of manufacturing.  Fortunately the gridfinity problem is much easier being planar.  I'll have to think more about the grid approach used in the isogrid models I downloaded.  Thanks for the link. 

A few hours working on the problem and writing relations now will likely save me frustration down the line.  My initial Creo model of these bins started with the profile being swept around a sketch but then I have to fill in the voids but that might not be the best approach for a parametric grid driven by relations.

Airfix

[Airfix]

tbraxton,

Okay, so I made a UDF for the base grid.  I'm trying to have a prompt for the user to be able to turn off or on some of the features.  In this case I want to turn off/on only the 4 corner extrudes but because they were in my original pattern I can't seem to turn them off in the UDF.  Do I need to to pattern the corner fill extrudes independent of the sweep, or do I need to use ProProgram or a family table and prompt the user through that?

Attached is my UDF in a zip file (Creo 9).  BTW it is a metric model and placement should be self explanatory.

Cheers,

Airfix

[tbraxton]

I opened your model and was able to get it to work as you intended. This is not the approach I would take with the UDF functionality. I would make a single model that is driven by the number of cells required to build the base plate which would not involve using any UDFs to create the baseplate geometry. The approach with this is to create a plate of the correct size for the array and then cut out each cell to form the pockets. By exploiting geometry patterns this can be done in a manner that regenerates quickly as will be seen in the video.

In this baseplate model I would include a csys at the center of each cell which could then be used to drop UDFs on a cell for any modification to the baseplate (i.e. cutting away cells for non-rectangular arrays). If you are clever about building the UDFs then you can very quickly customize a baseplate by placing them with a csys reference only.