Comparing Part Geometry

[ecarr]

Apologies in advance if this is a redundant topic.

I have various assemblies that we automate by resizing and then saving as a new assembly. (We're talking THOUSANDS here.) Once these assemblies are resized and saved, we have no way of determining what parts are the same and what parts are different. We need to know how many parts are the same so the CNC programmers don't program the same model more than once.

What I'm thinking right now, is to use the Volume, Maximum Length, and Centroid of each similarly name part to compare them. If these three values are all the same, we want to use the Interference Detection command somehow as the last check. I wanted to know if anyone is in a similar situation and could tell me the best approach. Remember, we want to fully automate this.

 

[smcadman]

This may not help you because it only compares 2 models at a time. Utilities > Compare Documents
Also try Utilites > Compare Features
or Utilities > Compare Geometry

If you want to check several models en masse you would probably need a macro.

SW07 SP2.0

Flores

 

[drawoh]

eblackbu,

If you are controlling a small number of dimensions to get your different parts, could you do this from a design table?

From a design table, you can control the dimensions, and automatically generate tabulations based on those dimensions. If your CNC guys use the part number with tabulation to store their files, they will find anything you have already designed.

You will have to hack around with Microsoft Excel a little, but you might be surprised at what you can do.

JHG