How bad are solidworks parameters?

[TroyCDH]

I am not an expert in these text files that would drive the CAD design of a full robot. If you are looking for something like PTC's "Pro-Program" I think you are out of luck.

I have used SolidWorks for the past 8 years and I would suggest making an assembly with datum planes that have meaningful names and building "in- context" parts. Starting with a simple 4 piece perimeter frame the individual part lengths can go up to a datum plane for extrusion length. Other datums for sides and widths. So simply changing the dimension driving the datum plane offset will force the parts to change to the correct length.

This dimension could be changed in SolidWorks or (for example) on xls sheet that SolidWorks reads. At my work I have created xls sheets that have pull down options for various customer choices that equate to some number in the xls, that combines with other cells to get a final dimension, that is read by SolidWorks and assembly, parts and drawings are automatically updated.

This took me a couple weeks to figure out the first time, but I could redo it now much faster. Is all the effort worth it for a single yearly robot frame?

Troy