Linked Component Question
First of all I need to apoligize that I used your design in my training class without asking for your pemission.
It was surprising for me - given my number of posts and solution to find that Ihad to scramble for good reference material for this section of the class.
No, given that many of the parts in your desing require a CAM setup I bvelieve you are not wrong. If you keep everything in a single assembly "unlinked" then you have to set up the CAM for all the parts in that file . This has come up several times of the last few moths and I believ this is a limitation tha the Fusion 360 team sooner or later needs to address.
It might simply be that there is one feature msissing in Fusion 360 that would allow you to save a part inyto the data panle but retin a link to the oiginating design. I've suggested this in the Idea station quite a while ago. Once it's implemented in one form or another you could complete kmost of the design in a single file and then save the needed component into a linked component to work there on the CAM setup once the design is more otr less solid.
I have not yet tried the CAM in th Fusion 360. What ar the drawbacks of having all the CAM setups in one file ? Have you notived a perfomance penalty ?
Oh I don't mind at all that you used it. It was cool to see it up there. If it was an issue I wouldn't have posted it on the forums, so I don't mind at all.
I agree being able to bounce a component out as a linked file would really help the flow.
Having all those parts to setup in CAM would be a nightmare.
For instance, I'll use the part I'm currently working on as an example. It's only one part, nothing else in the design file. But this one part is complicated and has 9 difference setups to machine it. Each setup has it's own group of tools. And it's possible each setup could be run in a different machine here, so the tool numbers for each setup always start at 1 and go up from there.
Here is an example of the setup folders...
Those are the 9 different setups for this part. Each one of those folders has operations in it. So the first issue is if I had all of those parts from the example design you used, this list would be a nightmare to navigate and understand which one is which.
Here is the tool library showing all the tools used in the 9 setups above....
As you can see, this is already super confusing with just one part. Fusion doesn't allow you to group tools by each setup, which I have no idea why. Because this is a complete mess already. Trying to go back and figure out which tool #1 goes with which setup is a royal pain and a terrible work flow. So that list of tools is all that's needed for this one part. Now imagine if I had over 100 setups for all of those parts in the design you referenced. This list would be insanely large and unusable.
If they would let us group the tools by setups, that would be a great start to cleaning up the tool library for complex parts. But even so, a big design like the one you referenced would still be really confusing with a giant list of setups and would be a headache for the guys in the shop to figure out which is which and get it posted. So bouncing the parts out as a linked design would definitely be something that would help workflow.
The way I designed that machine was create all components in their own file and drop them into the main assembly to create the link. But it's a slow method and I'd definitely love a rethinking of that process.
There is a workaround but it's not very nice but I'll run through it.
First right click a component and select export and save locally, you might want to use stp files so you don't need to worry about the timeline. Next upload it back to your project using the data panel. Start a new empty design and insert the uploaded design, keep it linked and add you CAM setups\ops. If you modify the component in the assembly, export locally again but this time use upload new version to get the latest version, your file with the CAM setups will then prompt to update. You will probably lose some of your references in the CAM ops but that can happen if you make big changes anyway.
Not sure this will work for you, I use it when I need to work on imported files and it allows me to update without losing all the CAM side.
Mark
Mark Hughes
Owner, Hughes Tooling
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@ARTHUR-HM wrote:
... Hopefully a better solution is in the works
I am not so sure it is unless we point this out as an area of improvement. In the threads where I remeber seeing this problem was mentioned I did not see a lot of AD involvement.
It would seem clear to me that this requires wotrk on the Fusion 360 side as well as on the CAM side to meke this a truly integrated workflow to "design differnetly".
We've seen a lot of added functiuonality in Fusion 360 but I feel there is still a lot of work to be done to make it all work together more cohesively.
@brianrepp who woiuld we need to address this to ?
@ARTHUR-HM Thank you very much again for the detailed explanation!
I've updated the handout for my AU class on google docs and have linked back to this thread.
