Monthly Archives: February 2012

iLogic Tutorial – Automatic Board Configurator 02

Posted on by
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 In this, the second installment of this iLogic tutorial, we will extrude the solid bodies that will make up the multi-board top, and begin to develop the iLogic rule that will configure who many boards should be present, and how wide they need to be.

I’m not going to get super involved at this point, but I will add a configurable trim allowance at some point. I’m not 100% sure how to do so, but that’s never stopped me before.

We left off in the last installment –iLogic Tutorial – Automatic Board Configurator 01 –with the once single board top reduced to a more normal width <= 6, and have added three potential boards. The first thing to do would be to get rid of the Chamfer on the edge facing inwards…

 

Remove chamfer feature

Continue reading →





iLogic Tutorial – Automatic Board Configurator 01

Posted on by
 
 
 
 
 
 

This iLogic Tutorial for automatic board configuration will show how to model and write the iLogic code that will automatically adjust the number and width of boards that make up the top of the Shaker Table.

To begin this iLogic tutorial, we will need to go way back to the beginning of the Shaker Table series to the first sketch in the table’s Layout Part, the Top Sketch. The first thing to do in that Top Sketch is remove the horizontal constraint between the center of the top and the Center Point. Just window select the point shown below, then hit delete…

 

 

Ilogic Tutorial Board configurator Image 01 - The point

Continue reading →





Autodesk Inventor Now Integral Part of TigerStop Workflow

Posted on by

Autodesk Inventor Rev 1I just heard from Richard over at TigerStop, and he informs me that their software engineers are going to make the Autodesk Inventor .csv output a default profile in TigerStop’s Workflow Manager!

What this means for us Inventor users is that there will be no farting around configuring things in TigerStop’s software, all we will have to do is pick Autodesk Inventor from the list of programs during setup, and we are on our way. Sweet!

Now the thing to do is figure out a reliable way to automate the output from Inventor via iLogic, and maybe some additional help from the Inventor API –possibly triggered by the Rev. number? I could see having a company’s drawing templates having a Rev number set to -1 until RTM, at which point the trigger would be pulled and the Rev number would go to 0 –which would fire an iLogic rule that send the cutlists to the queue.  If that can be done relatively easy, even smaller shops could implement the start of their own mini ERP systems!

I imagine the code would look similar to this…

 

 Autodesk Inventor Crayon Syntax tutorial image 02 Continue reading →





Inventor Automation – Sending a Cut List to TigerStop

Posted on by
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

ED – This is a guest post on Inventor Automation is by Richard Gilmore of TigerStop LLC showing how to send automatically generated cutlists (parts lists) to a TigerStop (TigerFence, TigerCrossCut, Etc.) to speed production time and reduce errors. The cutlist shown here was generated by the model in the Shaker Table series of tutorials.

We use downloading software called Workflow Manager to sort the job files (normally by Width and Thickness) and then send the sorted jobs to TigerStop.  A Workflow Manager user would have to run a onetime file configuration on the .csv file to tell the software how to read it.  I will talk with my software folks to see if we can add Autodesk Inventor as a default profile in the software so the user doesn’t have to do the configuration step.  Next the user would go to the File menu and choose Open.  Once the user has chosen the Autodesk Inventor .csv file they will see this screen…

 

Inventor Automation Tutorial Image 01 - Inventor Tutorial for configuring a TigerStop Workflow Manager

  Continue reading →





Inventor iLogic – Rounding Decimals to Nearest Fraction

Posted on by

Inventor iLogic Rounding Tutorial Image 01 - An automatic cutlist for woodworking generated in Autodesk InventorThis post is an adjunct the Shaker Table series, and describes how to grab a decimal number from an Inventor iLogic parameter, round that number to the nearest specified fraction, then pass that new number to a new parameter that will make its way to a Cutlist.

What is happening here is that the model is reporting a length from a driven dimension  which can have quite a few numbers after the decimal point. The output we need is the closest fractional equivalent, so we will apply some math to round the driven dimension’s output to a fractional number. In this case, we will round to the nearest 32nd which would be a shop standard tolerance. The image below shows the driven dimension in question. It is attached to a line that describes the inner face of a corner bracket on a table design. The length of the line is entirely dependent on the overall size of the model as defined by the person fiddling with the inputs…

  Continue reading →





iLogic Tutorial for Creating a Woodworking Cutlist 2

Posted on by

iLogic Tutorial for Creating a Woodworking Cutlist Part Two image 1 - Excel, Access, DBF 4, DBF 3, Text, CSV, Unicode, and Unicode CSV output formatsAs a bonus (or total let-down), for this final post in this iLogic TutoriaI mini series, I contacted TigerStop to see if they can shed some light on automating the final list output beyond a printed list. We’ll cross our fingers on that one.

I’ve used the TigerStop stop/gage and pusher system at a couple of the places I’ve worked at, and neither of them had any sort of automation —like using your vacuum cleaner as a push broom. We manually typed in values that were manually pulled from crappy drawings. So we will find a good way to automate…..or die trying. Maybe not. But we will look gosh-darned hard!

On to what can be done in Inventor, making a automated cutlist (pretty damned cool if you ask me). Firstly we should quickly create some proper views. As you can see in the image below, the View Cube is showing an upside-down top view for what should be one of the side views. To remedy this, right click on the View Cube, select Set Current View as… and choose Front.

 

iLogic Tutorial for Creating a Woodworking Cutlist Part Two image 2- Fixing the view cube in this Autodesk Inventor Tutorial

Continue reading →