Need help automating Hydraulic Tube modeling. iLogic or VBA

[cendahl]

A lot of our customers send us 2D pdf prints for hydraulic tubes. I am looking for a way to quickly make a 3D model of the tubes so that we can make our own "in-house" prints based on the XYZ coordinates of each point given on the pdf print.

I was hoping to input these paramaters into some sort of dialog box with drop downs using iLogic or an Inventor Macro

inputs

>XYZ coordinates (read from some sort of excel file, i've used the 3D sketch funtion which imports points so maybe that feature/tool could be called with iLogic or some VBA code.)

>Tube Diameter

>Wall Thickness

>Centerline Radius

Press a go button.

outputs

>3D sweep of bent tube with correct tube diameter and wall thickness and tangent arcs with the correct centerline radius (bends) inbetween each straight section

My ultimate goal would be to include a drop down list of fittings and add those onto either end of the tube and have the tube resize its length based on fitting length. However, if someone could give some insight on how to at least get started on the tube itself using iLogic or a VBA macro, that would be great.

I have used Solidworks, and Excel macros before, but with those programs you can record a macro so you at least have some code to tweak. With inventor, I don't really know where to start as far as defining inputs and calling features and dimensions within those features to change based on the inputs.

Thanks,

-CE

[adam.nagy]

Hi,

Definitely start with VBA because there you can debug the code and can check the properties of the various objects you are manipulating.

Concerning creating a sweep I found this: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-customization/need-help-automating-hydraulic-tube-modeling-il...

Once you know how to create what you need from a bunch of points, then you might want to take advantage of some of the Excel functions that are exposed in iLogic to do the same thing based on points coming from Excel.

I hope this helps. 

Cheers,