So I recently downloaded Autodesk Inventor and downloaded all the parts, imported them… blah,blah,blah! But I haven’t tried to do this, but can you, or how do you cut parts. I haven’t tried to just in case I would break it and would have re-download that part. Also, if you guys could post your AutoCAD builds of your robots. Thank you
You have to save it as a new part
Thank you so much, this will help me a lot.
Sorry for another question. When I downloaded the parts, there was a motor. The only problem with the motor is there is a giant wire.
How can I get rid of the wire.
Just to point out, the program’s name is Autodesk Inventor. Autodesk AutoCAD is another 2D based parametric CAD program. Not the same thing.
One trick you can use: for things such as C Channels or bar plates, only CAD one section of it, and then pattern it. Set the instances of pattern to a global variable. So say that you want a 7 hole bar plane, rather than making an awkward extruded cut on a part, make a copy of that one patterned file and simply change the instance of pattern to how many holes or sections you want. This can apply to 2D plates as you can linear pattern in 2 directions.
You know what, I should start making some Autodesk Inventor videos with VEX because I love CAD so much. Personally I fav solidworks over inventor tho, but yeah, inventor is indeed more accessible to high school students.
Sorry for another question. When I downloaded the parts, there was a motor. The only problem with the motor is there is a giant wire.
How can I get rid of the wire.
First, you’ve got to figure out whether the motor is modeled as a multi-body part or an assembly. I’d do it as multi body part, but my assumption is that most likely it will be an assembly. You can simply tell by looking at file extension. Part files end in .ipt and assembly files end in .iam.
If it’s an assembly file, click on the wire and see which element in the feature tree (the window with a list on the left hand side of the screen) is highlighted. That’s the wire. You can either delete it or right click on it and un-check the visibility box.
If it’s a part, then you’ll have to go in and figure out which feature is that wire, and maybe suppress it. Details are in this video starting from 2:40
A suggestion is that the more you put in an assembly, the more ram it will take up, and the slower graphic update and editing can be. A motor as an assembly has awful a lot of parts that you don’t even need in a VEX robot visualization. What I suggest doing is deleting all parts in a motor except for external casing, metal screw holes and the shaft attachment gear. Doing this makes everything faster.
I say this a lot: CAD is used to visualize before actually building, which is supposed to help you figure out whether parts might interfere, how exactly should my design come together, and if anything in general will work. Finding out something doesn’t work in CAD in most cases causes less trouble and consumes less time than actual failed build experiments, and that’s the point of modeling the robot in computer. As you get good you can also use it to do other things, such as find center of gravity if needed and doing some simple stress analysis or what not. But remember, it’s stupid and pointless to build a robot before hand, CAD it, then put a rendered picture in notebook and make the notebook somewhat nice. It kills the entire point of CAD and judges know perfectly well that students like to do this.
You could cut the wire off using the method in the video shown (just easiest method, may not be practical). By the way, no problem.
It says I cannot edit the part. How can I fix or bypass this?
Hello?
If it says you can’t edit it, it probably means the creator of this part set something up that prevents you from editing it, which I haven’t experienced before. It’s stupid. Don’t do this, people.
There’s probably a way to hack this. Save this part as a .STEP file, then open the .STEP file using inventor, then save it as a .ipt file again. You’ll lose access to any previous feature, the part is just a lump of geometry now, and it’s gonna lose all appearance, color, mass, material parameters. But now you can probably make a cut on it. And you can always recolor it if you want to.
BTW you can download any part file from VEX website where they sell the parts, but the parts are step files and you can’t directly go back and see how they modeled it or edit some of the parameters.
If this library messes up everywhere, try Jordan’s old 2011 library. It has a lot of new parts missing, but not that bad. I’ve been using this for a while now, and I just grab whatever new part I need from VEX website.
link: https://vexforum.com/t/team-24-super-sonic-sparks-vex-cad-library/19092/1
Thank you so much
I can’t find one section of one