automate assembly component movement

[michaelpaul]

I have a simple assembly of a door and an enclosure housing. I want to be able to automate the travel for the door so that I can see the interaction of the two parts through the range of motion that the door will swing through. currently, I use brute force and ignorance and simply change the assembly angle through several values and look at the sections I'm interested in at each step. But, this is tedious and while I'm working on features that require multiple iterations this process also gets rather tedious since I need to check the door at at least 5 positions through it's travel.

I'm just beginning to research what my options are but figured I'd throw the question out here too. I'm sure I'll have to use mechanism but I've never used it before so I'm not sure what I need to look for yet.

my door will basically swing from 0 degrees to 180 degrees.

what's the best way to automate the door movement between these two values? I'd prefer a loop so I can see it move and check different areas of the assembly while it moves.

most of the totorials I've stumbled across are for cams and followers or just to animate an assembly explode so not necessarily what I'm looking for.

thanks

 

[jay.coker]

you can use mechanism for this. See the attached basic model. Go to applications-mechanism, and play the attached Analysis. You can change angles and timing by editing the servo motor,
hope this helps
regards j

 

[michaelpaul]

you can use mechanism for this. See the attached basic model. Go to applications-mechanism, and play the attached Analysis. You can change angles and timing by editing the servo motor,
hope this helps
regards j

Thanks Jay. this helped a lot.

But since it's a PTC product, nothing is easy. I finally figured out that to actually get the door to move you had a table with various angles entered. are you saying that you can't have the software automatically move the door between 0 and 180 degrees at whatever even interval the software determines? seems like a royal P.I.T.A. to have to manually enter all of the angles at specific time intevals

 

[jay.coker]

I just used that particular function as an example. You could just drag the part to wherever you want, or there are other a variety of different options (constant, ramp, cosine etc). Look in help about types of servo motor profiles