Motion Module - SolidWorks Assembly

Now we had to take all of the solidworks parts and combine them into an assembly, which we had no idea how to do. So we fiddled around with the solid works and eventually figured out how to get the parts onto the assembly. Yay!

Then we stared at the screen a little bit wondering what to do with these parts. One thing we did figure out on our own was that we had to make the rods as a part in solidworks so that we would have the rods to stick the pieces into. So we did that and then stared at the screen again.

We tried all of the usual things like trying to line them up my hand and hoping against all odds that the parts would stay like that when we started to rotate it, which of course it didn't. Then we overheard the ninja saying "..something something MATE something something..".

So clicked on the mate button, which worked wonders. We started to mate them to together using the concentric function. We made all of the holes that the rod went through, concentric with the rods. Now we had the parts onto the rod but the kept sliding back and forth and overlapping on each other.

At this point, the class tutorial on mating started and we discovered the coincident function. We then made all of the pieces that need to be next to each other coincident so that all of the pieces were now stuck together.

Our last problem was that the arm and the offset circle were overlapping in the assembly. We solved this by making the two surfaces that touched tangent to each other. We ended up with this assembly after a lot of tinkering and a lot of mating.

We then happened to see the simulation button and decided to try that one. We clicked simulation rotation and then chose the offset circle to be the one that rotated. And it worked wonderfully!

The most wonderful thing about this process was that it told us that the arm piece was too tall so there was a "collision" and it wouldn't work. So we went back and made that piece shorter so that it would work! Solidworks told us that out initial design wouldn't work and we were able to make the iteration before we printed out the pieces!!