From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2018 Essential Training

Selecting component configurations in an assembly - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2018 Essential Training

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Selecting component configurations in an assembly

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- [Instructor] In this movie we're going to be looking at creating an assembly of multiple configurations of the same exact part. Now on the screen here I've got a Lego that I designed and you can see if you go over here to configuration manager we've got a whole bunch of different configurations of the same part. So I've got a half brick, I've got a long one, I've got a long and wide one, I've got a single brick as well as a thin brick, so much different options or a bunch of different configurations of the same exact part. Now if you look at the difference between this one here and maybe this long and wide one. You can see there's a whole bunch more of these posts on this version here. So we want the number of posts to automatically adjust as I change the size of the brick, and I'm going to show you a quick little trick on how to do that. Let's go over here back to the feature manager, come down here to equations. Right click on equations and say manage equations. Alright, so now what's happening is I'm determining the X spacing and the Y spacing using an equation. So the first thing I want to point out is inside these brackets here is I'm taking the length of this brick, right, and I'm dividing it by two, so for instance here, it's maybe 1.6 inches long and I'm dividing that by two which gives you .8 inches, so that's the value of this interior part of the equation. So I don't want .8 post, I want 8 posts, so I need to multiply that by 10 to get the eight. Now, for instance if you did have a weird length that had a decimal place, I'm using this int function right over here to turn that floating point number into an integer, so I get a nice round number. I'm doing exactly the same thing right below that, so you get a couple different options here for creating the number of spacings in both the X and Y. Once you have that go ahead and click on okay. Now automatically this pattern will be driven by those values. So notice I'm linking them together with this global variable here so I'm toggling it to that global variable. And same thing over here, I'm toggling that over and linking that value to that global variable, so they automatically adjust when I change the size of the brick. That being said lets go ahead and create an assembly from this part here. So I'm going to go over here to make assembly from part. Alright start an assembly using the default template. And let's go ahead and just bring in one of these bricks from the beginning, and let's go ahead and tile the windows. So I'm going to say tile horizontally. And now what I can do is I can just bring in multiple copies, so here's the part right here. Go ahead and just drag it in, you can see you can easily add more components. You can also switch over here to the configuration manager and in here we can see the different sizes or types of bricks, so I can click on like the half brick and I can then drag that brick in over here. Same thing over here, just go down again, let's pick the long flat one, drag that in and you can see we got that other one here. Now you can continue bringing in these different configurations to build your assembly and once you have all them in there go ahead and expand that back out. Alright and now that we have these configurations in here I can easily make copies of the individual configurations. Notice if I hold down control in my keyboard, I can click on an instance here and just drag out another copy. I can do the same thing over here, and notice whichever instance you choose it's going to make an exact copy of that one. Same thing if I were to spin something around. I'm going to spin this one here, make a copy of that one, it stays in that same orientation as well, so pretty handy. So generally what you want to do is get your components close to where they want to be and close to the right configuration and then copy the one that looks very similar to the one you want to use. Now if you have a configuration already in here and you want to switch to a different configuration, come over here and at the very top of this little pop up window it allows you to select any one of those configurations. Right, so if I just go to regular brick, click on the green check mark, it'll switch over to that other configuration. So you can easily switch from configuration to configuration right in the assembly window. If you want to make another copy of something, hold on control, drag it out and then you can just quickly build your assembly using these components. So this is a pretty good example of showing you how just using one simple part we're able to create all these different shapes and then bring them all into an assembly and easily switch from one shape to the next and make copies of the individual components.

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