At my job dimensions, on drawings, often get detached after and update by our configurator. One of the solutions would be creating the dimensions after the configurator finished. But creating dimensions with the Inventor API is difficult. Last November we upgraded to Inventor 2021 and I did read about the new iLogic functions. Last week I did have time to dive deeper in those new iLogic functions. This blog is about what I found.
I wish you all the best for 2021. I hope that we can go back to normal life this year. Today I have a iLogic rule for you that creates an “I” similar to the Inventor logo.
I’ve recently seen several questions from people looking to save or export files automatically. Questions like “How to perform ‘save a copy as’ PDF for a list of Inventor drawings from an excel?” and “Automate iPart flat pattern export to DXF”. That is why I wrote this post, explaining how you can write your own iLogic export rules.
I created an addon that will let you create buttons for external iLogic rules without writing any code.
In some cases, you want to have a rule that is triggered by the “Before Save” event trigger. For example, to check if the iProperty “Part number” was set. You may get unexpected or unwanted results when you save an assembly with lots of parts that are changed. You could end up with many message boxes. One for each part that gets saved in the assembly.
Have you ever wanted assign specific profiles in your flat pattern to a custom layer before exporting them to DXF? I have been working on updating an Inventor add-on which we use at work. The tool exports sheet metal flat patterns to our CAM software.
If you have read any of my blogs post before, you’ll know that I like to challenge myself to solve other Inventor user’s problems. I usually find these problems on the Inventor Customization Forum. A while back, I came across an interesting problem. This user wanted to change the iProperties of a part, based on it’s thickness and material.
The other day I had a look at the “Inventor Ideas” forum. I came a cross the following topic “Show Changed Dimensions when Opening Drawings”. (link) Last week someone requested this function in inventor but as it turns out that exactly the same function was also requested in 2017. (link) But it is still “Gathering Support”. Personally I never needed this but I can see that it could be useful in some situations.
At the company that I work for, we make products that are almost entirely composed of sheet metal parts. We cut and bend our products ourselves, we export our flat patterns out, to be used in our CAM software. When preparing flat patterns for export, I sometimes get confused, as it can be difficult to see which faces is the top side is of a sheet, or which bends are up or down.
Maybe you know the situation, you have 2 versions of a part. You changed something but can’t find what it was. In those situations I spend a lot of time looking for the difference. Just to find the hole that was moved 1mm. Should I have this problem more often, then maybe my boss would let me spend time on creating a tool to help me. But I don’t have this problem often.
Over the years, I have created several assemblies containing many parts with various iLogic rules, generally they work perfectly. But sometimes for seemingly no reason, an edge case will not work as expected, and is usually discovered by a colleague. The challenge is that I then need to find the rule that is responsible for the problem. Often I know more or less what to look for, but out of the box, there is no iLogic search command that will look through all of the parts and all of the rules in an assembly.
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University computer science.
HBO Mechanical engineer.
MBO Fine mechanics.
Programmer and
Mechanical engineer
at Kelvion
(2016 - 20..)
Mechanical engineer
at Strukton
(2009 - 2016)
Mechanical engineer
at RDG-engineering
(2007 - 2009)
CNC Programmer
at VMC
(2005 - 2007)
volunteer
at Taizé
(2007)
Objectgeoriënteerd analyseren en ontwerpen, Objectgeoriënteerd programmeren in Java, Webapplicaties: de clientkant, Databases, Security Aware Programmer, Web Security Specialist