I was making a Versaplanetary with configurations when I had a thought.
When a Solidworks Toolbox part, say, a bolt, is added into an assembly, a special Toolbox “Configure Component” thingy pops up on the left, and it’s possible to select the bolt’s diameter, length, and thread display mode from a drop down menu. Won’t it be cool if this works for the Versaplanetary? You would drag the Versaplanetary into an assembly, then choose encoder or not, number of stages, input, and the output from drop down menus:cool: . I still can’t figure out how to do it though, despite some efforts.
I should really be studying for finals instead…
Anyways, what magic is happening in the background to create different size bolts in Solidworks Toolbox, and can it be used on the Versaplanetary?
I tried a couple of things. First, after a bit of googling, I was able to add a random test part into Solidworks Toolbox (it happened to be a CIM). When I drag the CIM into an assembly, the Toolbox “Configure Component” window does pop up. But of course, there are no options- I didn’t add any!
So I opened up the file of the Toolbox bolt and tried to see how it’s done (it has worked before, when I discovered mate references), but I can’t find any trace of how they make the drop down menus work. It doesn’t seem to be configurations; there are far less configurations than there are possible bolts.
After some time spent clicking every button that seemed relevant, I figured out how to use the Toolbox Settings (the separate application from Solidworks itself) to add “Custom Properties” to that CIM. Now if I drag that CIM into an assembly, I do get the drop down menus and I can select from the random values I gave to a random testing custom property. However, when I open up the file of the CIM, while the random testing custom properties I added are there creating new configurations with different names (oh! that explains the bolt file from earlier), that custom property does nothing to the model geometry. I’m missing a step here, and I have no idea what I’m doing. What are custom properties anyways? Is there a way to link these “custom properties” things to the model geometry, aka something we can see?
By the way, when I’m adding files into Toolbox, only parts could be selected. It seems to be impossible to add assemblies like the Versaplanetary. Is there a way to get around this?