Hey Everyone,
I am working on a CAD for my robot. Whenever I want to move parts, the most efficient way is using mates, as it perfectly aligns the instance with whatever i need it to. But adding mate after mate brings so much lag with it. Does anyone know any type of alignment tool that still perfectly aligns the instance, but not being mated to that other part? Any help is greatly appreciated.
Grouping is your friend in Onshape.
The group tool should be used in place of 100s of fastened mates. I’m not sure how it actually works under the hood, but this makes the CAD less laggy.
Also, if you are having lag troubles, try supressing anything that you don’t need to “exist” at the moment.
Usually what I do is I mate all the stuff I need to, then I duplicate the assembly for the next iteration’s edits, then go back to the original one, group everything, and either delete/suppress all the mates, except for the ones that involve motion.
Mates usually treat each object as seperate, but groups treat grouped objects as one.
Are you perchance CAD-ing all your screws and nuts? I usually don’t (only for exploded views for notebook build instructions).
And do you have all your robot in one assembly? I usually seperate each mechanism into seperate assemblies and have one assembly tab that combines everything together.