Tag Archives: Inventor

Autodesk Inventor is a parametric rules-based modeling program with direct modeling capabilities

Inventor 2013 New Feature – Context Sensitive Marking Menu

Posted on by

 

 
 
 

Context Sensitive Marking Menu’s are not new for Inventor 2013, Inventor 2012 had this feature as well. What is new is an additional environment that the Context Sensitive Marking Menu is available. It is now available in the Sketch Environment! My workflows cause me to spend a great deal of time in the Sketch Environment so the 24 new sketch features plus this new feature are a welcome sight!

The Sketch Environment generally takes a back seat to flashy gimcracks and gaudy thingamajigs. It’s not sexy. A reseller cannot inspire awe in a potential customer by showing a PowerPoint presentation of some dude’s line making prowess. But to those of us who create scads of Layout Parts and other sketch intensive workflows, the new and improved Sketch Environment in Inventor 2013is sexy as all-get-out………….alright, not really, but it’s welcome nonetheless.    Continue reading →





iLogic Tutorial for Creating a Woodworking Cutlist

Posted on by
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

We’ll start this iLogic tutorial by informing you that there is no built-in cutlist functionality in Autodesk Inventor –parts lists, sure, but a parts list in most cases is about as useful as teats on a bull. I will likely go back later and split the top and create a glue-up schedule as well, but for now, an automated cutlist.

I cobbled together the technique used in this iLogic tutorial back when iLogic was a subscription bonus add-in a few years back. It uses Custom iProperties  to hold WIDTH, LENGTH, and THICKNESS values on a per-part basis. These values are filled in automatically using and iLogic rule that reads parameters in the parts, and are then used at the drawing level in fields of the same name.

This tutorial builds upon the twenty three previous tutorials in the Shaker Table series. On with the Cutlist Tutorial. Begin by opening up the Designing a Shaker Table with Autodesk Inventor.iam (the assembly). From there open the layout part which should be at the top of the list in the Browser Bar. We need to know all of the parameters that describe the width, length, and thickness of the Leg A solid body so that we can bring them into the assembly. Looking at the Parameter Editor, we can see one of them, Leg_Width…

 

iLogic Tutorial for Creating a Woodworking Cutlist image 01 - Autodesk Inventor Tutorial

  Continue reading →





Inventor iLogic Assembly Automation Tutorial Decoded

Posted on by

Inventor iLogic Code Tutorial image 01 - Image of iLogic CodeThis post is a follow-up to the Assembly Automation Tutorial for Inventor iLogic post where we added the fifty-some odd lines of iLogic code to our Inventor Assembly. Today’s post will attempt to explain that code.

This post was supposed to be published yesterday, but I spent most of the day screwing around with a plugin that will eventually allow me to post Inventor iLogic code with the proper syntax highlighting that can be copy & pasted right from the webpage into your iLogic Code Editor without intermediate programs adding special characters that screw up the code. I’ll be posting a bit more on that in the next post. Until that is up-and-running, I’ll use images…   

 

Inventor iLogic Code Tutorial image 02 - This is the image of the first chunk of iLogic code used in our sample

The first two lines of code (above) are creating variables. The Nut_Offset variable gets its value by  reading the Nut_Offset parameter in the Hanger Bolt:1 part. The second variable, Overall_Size is reading two local parameters (Blue) and multiplying them against each other to get its value.

  Continue reading →





Layout Part Workflow Strategy for Autodesk Inventor

Posted on by

Autodesk Inventor tutorial for creating a layout partIn today’s installment of the Shaker Table illogic Tutorial, we will add the layout part to the main assembly, create a new LOD (Level of Detail), and create some holes to accept the Hanger Bolts we created in a previous exercise.

 Because we will be going back and forth between the Layout Part and the assembly (most of the physical changes are going to be made to the layout part, not the components in the assembly), I usually place my layout parts in the assemblies they control as sort of a quick launch scheme. Sounds a bit convoluted, and some of you old-timers may be thinking of the dreaded cyclical dependency, but that is not the case. In some of my models I have dozens of layout parts, some controlling hundreds of parts (as can be seen in the image to the right). Having quick access to layout parts becomes very important as models become larger.

 

Continue reading →





iLogic Tutorial for Creating a SmartPart 3

Posted on by
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

In this, the final installment in this little sidebar iLogic tutorial for the Shaker Table series of tutorials, we will add the iLogic code that will hook the model to the spec’s posted at the beginning of this miniseries. Once this tutorial is completed, we will insert this part into the table and have the table control it automatically.

This iLogic Tutorial is winding down –there is not a lot left to do so let’s get right at it. Open up the Hanger Bolt.iam assembly, then open up the iLogic Rule Editor. You should have the following code there…

 

Inventor Tutorial for SmartPart – Part 3 image 01 - Autodesk Inventor's iLogic code

…if not, you will need to get it there. From looking at the list of available hanger bolts below, we can see that there are no bolts that have two different diameters for a particular length…

Continue reading →





iLogic Tutorial for Creating a SmartPart 1

Posted on by
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 In this Inventor iLogic Tutorial we will create a SmartPart that represents all of the hanger bolts used by a fiction small woodworking shop. We will then place it in the Shaker Table model and have it controlled automatically by same.

To begin this iLogic tutorial the first thing we need to do in this  is to define the hanger bolts. A look at McFeely’s turned up the following list:

  

1/4-20 x 1 1/2 Hanger Bolt Dry Lube
1/4-20 x 2 Hanger Bolt Dry Lube
1/4-20 x 2 1/2 Hanger Bolt Dry Lube
1/4-20 x 3 Hanger Bolt Dry Lube
1/4-20 x 3 1/2 Hanger Bolt Dry Lube
5/16-18 x 4 Hanger Bolt Dry Lube
5/16-18 x 4 1/2 Hanger Bolt Dry Lube
5/16-18 x 5 Hanger Bolt Dry Lube

 

With the list of options on-hand, we can get modeling. We could actually not model anything at all and still have the hardware show up on the parts list and the BOM, but we’ll leave that for another day. The shape of the hanger bolt is incredibly simple, so all I will do here is say that you should make it to roughly three inches long, and have the following constraints added (during drawing if possible, otherwise add them)…

  Continue reading →