Mechanism: trouble with bodies

[altendky]

I am assembling a mechanism (car with moving suspension and rolling
wheels) in ProE 2001's mechanism extension (not
mechanica/motion). Many of the parts I assemble in work fine,
while others do not get marked as bodies. Specifically, dragging
doesn't work well and the body doesn't get highlighted when using
'Highlight Bodies'. The trouble seems to happen only when
assembling a second instance of the same part (already have the left
suspension control arm assembled, then add the same part file as the
right control arm). On top of this, I managed to get one of the
'second' parts working, but others are still broken. Does ProE
often have problems in Mechanism when using two copies of the same
part? Is there a solution? Thanks for any insight you can
offer.



-Kyle

 

[Israr]

Does ProE often have problems in Mechanism when using two copies of the same part?


I use MDO of WF 2.0 and there is no such problem.


Which datecode is your pro/e 2001? I have used 2003400 pro/e 2001 and I remember there was no such problem.


Israr

 

[altendky]

i have not done very much with mechanism before, so i have no knowledge of it's 'normal' response to having multiple parts.



what exactly does mdo stand for?



i'll check when i get back to school, but i think it's old. they
have been debating upgrading to wf and switching to solidworks for the
past year and a half, but still, 2001 it remains.



interestingly, the trouble seems to be unrelated to how i assembled the
parts since i can simply reorder the two parts in the model tree and
mechanism will always create a body for whichever is listed
first. is there any notion of assembly 'instances'? perhaps
it would help here, but more directly for one of my other mechanisms
which had two copies of a ball joint (a mechanism assembly itself)
which would move in unison even though they had no connection to
eachother.



thanks,

-kyle

 

[Israr]

MDO stands for Mechanidm Dynamics Option. At your school you must have because all university licenses do have MDO.


If you can send me your parts, I will assemble these for you. But the files of educational version are not comatible with commercial vrsion and we use commercial version of Wildfire 2.0


Israr

 

[altendky]

datecode at school is 2003240. thanks for the offer re:
assembling for me, but this assembly is more of a learning process than
working towards a result set. thus, if i can't do it, it doesn't
do me much good. what really bugs me is i managed to get one part
pair working, but not the next. can't remember what i did that
finally took care of it.

 

[altendky]

thanks for your willingness to help, but i may have figured it
out. i am working with files from last year which were modeled by
other people and i found that the parts in question (actually
assemblies) had an empty subassembly in them for some reason.
after deleting the empty subassembly, all seems fine. not sure
why that would break it, but oh well. thanks again.



-kyle

 

[altendky]

having used MDO in both 2001 and wildfire, is the wildfire version
significantly better/more stable (from a perspective of modeling the
system without it blowing up)?

 

[slashct]

There are some "glitches" in 2001 and I have seen it where you should be able to assemble items and it does not like it mostly in older builds than what you are using. The build you are using is pretty new and would hope not to have them.
One of the problems you might be having is when assembling them you need to make sure that the assy references you reference for the part being assembled is from the same part. If you choose different parts than it will fail.


One trick is to use the conventional constraints, ie align, mate. Than having the allow assumptions onremove the constraints not valid with the joint, than drop down into the joint options and it should convert if it does not than something is not valid. This usually works pretty good, mind you it might not pick the correct joint which you can easily do....