From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2021 Essential Training

Selecting component configurations - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

From the course: SOLIDWORKS 2021 Essential Training

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Selecting component configurations

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- [Instructor] For this movie, I want to show you how we can create an assembly of multiple parts that all happened to be the exact same part, just different configurations of that part. So right over here, you can see I've got the configuration manager opened up and I've got a Lego break here on my screen. And if I click on the default, it switches to a different color. If I switched to a different half brick, you can see I've got a whole bunch of different versions of Legos inside of this part. So if I switch over here to this long and wide brick, you can see we've got a whole bunch of these little dots at the top here, which connect the bricks together. Now, one thing I do want to point out how I created all these configurations. Obviously the base of the blocks is pretty simple to do because I can just drive those dimensions very easily from design table. However, what about these little pins here at the top? How do we control how many we actually get? Well, let me show you. If I head over here to the feature manager and inside there, we have equations. And if I Right Click on it and say, manage equations, I'm using a little bit of a fancy equation here. So the X spacing here and the Y spacing are driven from this equation. So let me explain what's happening here. So one is the D two at sketch. One is the length of the bar, the brick, and then taking that, dividing it in half, and then time sing it my 10. So that is our spacing. And then what I'm doing is a converting it over to an integer. So I'm saying this wants to be okay. And then I'm doing very, similar here with the other direction, the Y spacing. So this equation will equate back to eight by four, and then that is, what's going to be driving these values over here. So that's how I do that. So it's kind of complicated, but it's a cool way. You can use equations to define your shape. And then over here on under my linear pattern, I'm then using these linked equations here and down here to define the size of how many in the X and how many in the Y of these little dots I'm putting on my part. Right? And I do want to point out right over here, actually right under here is sketch one inside of there are those values, right? So I'm saying that's, that's the one value here. This is the other value here. And those they're pink showing that these are linked to values that are driven from the design table. So I can't actually change them here because it's part of the table. All right, once I get back out of that, now I've got that brick and of course I can change different configurations. Now, what I want to do is create an assembly from my break here. So go over here and say, make assembly from part let's go ahead and bring that first part in. And now if you want to bring different configurations in, I can switch over here to Tyler's online. And here's my original part. Here's my, assembly at the top, you can actually switch over here to the configuration manager and you can click and grab these individual parts from the tree over here. So I can bring in these different versions of the part by clicking and dragging them in from this list over here. So I can just bring those things in for easily, have all these different configurations, all in my same assembly. So I'm going to bring in a single brick and it's in brick. Why not? Let's bring them all on. Okay. So now that we got all the bricks in here, expand that out. Of course I can move these things around. I can rotate them around. And if you want multiple instances of the same brick, if you just hold down control, I can drag out another copy. And if I take that other copy and I rotate it around, and then I make another copy by holding on control, drag it out. The other copy will be in the exact same orientation as the one that I copied. The other thing I can do if I want to switch to a different configuration, I can just click on the brick itself and notice up here. It says long flat, and over here, I get the full list of everything I have. So I can just switch easily to a different brick and the configuration will automatically adjust. So you can easily build whatever you want. If you're into Legos, man, this would be awesome. And you just start bringing in, Lego's copying them as they needed to switch to any version of the Lego you want and snap it all together. So it's a really quick way to use configurations and the design tables to build very similar parts that all have similar features. And then we can then build pretty complicated assemblies using exactly those parts. And again, we only have one part in there it's just different configurations of the same exact part.

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