I’m trying to place an assembly “intelligently,” but I am finding that there are several steps to this and am looking for advice on the best practice in ZW3D. I’ve made a video to clarify:
Intelligent Assembly Placement in ZW3D (YouTube)
The first few steps involve creating the assembly.
Define a configuration. In my example, I a have a power switch with nuts and washers. There is an assembly configuration to specify the panel thickness and therefore how the nuts/washers should be spaced. This of course also requires defining a couple of expressions such as panelThickness.
Define Assembly Handles. When inserting an assembly, there are a few key constraints that need to be defined. In order to help automate this, Assembly Handles can be used to create custom prompts and define the types of constraints needed.
Define a sketch outline. This will be used when creating the hole used to mount the switch on a panel.
The next few steps are needed when inserting the assembly into a parent assembly:
- Define mount hole location using a point
- Data Exchange → External Sketch to insert a sketch into the parent assembly
- Move the sketch to be centered on the point defined above
- Rotate the sketch so that the keyway is in the right location
- Extrude/Cut the sketch outline to make the hole
This is a lot of very manual work. I’d like these manual steps to be encapsulated in a single file that I can just insert. I’ve tried UDF (User Defined Features), but once created, I couldn’t figure out how to edit it. And they quite don’t do everything here. I supposed what I’m wondering is what can be accomplished in ZW3D that is close to Inventor iPart / iMate / iFeature.