SolidWorks 2010 Bible

Chapter 14: Assembly Configurations and Display States

FIGURE 14.9

The assembly used for this example

Notice also that although the grippers are positioned correctly, the arm is still allowed to swivel

around the intended target point. You can correct this by defining an orientation for the grippers

for each location. If an additional pivot were added to the assembly, then fully defining the parts

would become more difficult. The arm would not be able to reach any additional points, but it

would not be so limited in orienting the grippers at each point.

Driving the position indirectly

You can also use mates to drive configured positions of the assembly using a series of angle mates.

This makes it more difficult because to get to a particular location, you have to do some calcula-

tions, but the angle mates are to be more stable than it would be to simply reply on moving the

parts to unconstrained positions.

If you cycle through the derived configurations under the Indirect top-level configuration, notice

that mates are not suppressed and unsuppressed; rather the values are changed. This makes it

somewhat more difficult to precisely position the grippers, but because it is specific about the posi-

tions of the individual parts, there is no ambiguity.

Positioning with sketches

Although this technique still uses mates to position the parts and to change the position, you

change sketch dimensions rather than mate values. Sketches used to drive parts from an assembly

are sometimes called layout sketches or skeletons. I also discuss them in Chapter 16 for in-context or

top-down assembly techniques and Chapter 11 as a way of controlling its parent-child relation-

ships. Figure 14.10 shows the same assembly that is used for the rest of this chapter.