Feedback...
Not having much experience with simulations i find it a bit hard to work with this program.
I used an inventor iam to run calculations on. Eventhough it was fully constrained in inv. i had to redo constraints in Simulus. Doing manual constraints was a bit hard. issues i had: selelcting 2 parts you have to use the shift key while i first tried it with the ctrl key. Which seems more natural for a windows user. You usualy use the ctrl key to individualy select items into a list and shift to select items from-to. Also after each constraint i had to reselect the add manual constraint instead of it repeating until i end the command (Apply-OK as in the constraint command in Inv. for instance).
And i had trouble getting the results out. Uploading to 360 is ok. but i missed a simple jpg/avi output for sharing the results with others. Now i had to sent out invitations to non users to go to 360. And using both Opera and IE it kept naging about using Chrome to view data.
And making measurments in the results is a pain. i had a tweel design and wanted to know how much the axle would lower under load. but i could not get the tool to show me that.
I have not tried to do comarisons between designs. i could not realy figure out how to manupulate the model, from within Simulus. And altering the inv. model did nothing for the simulation at hand. i had to redo the whole sim setup.
Taking about setting up the sim... Adding loads was not nice. i wanted a load on both berarings of the tweel. selecting the inner bearing surface the load set to the surface instead of the centerline. not a big problem, were it not that it was set to the 9o'clock position (6o'clock being the 'road surface' direction) i could rotate the force vector but could for the life of me not get it to shift from the 9 to 6 o'clock position.
I also wanted to do 2 simulations, one with a spoke on the floor and one with the midpoint between 2 spokes on the floor. But i could not get the model (tweel part) to rotate in Simulus. repositioning the inv. model and reopening the sim file did nothing. it kept the original design situation. And how would one go about modifing, in my case, the thickness of the spokes from within Simulus?
Not having simulation in my inv. suite i was happy enough to be able to have this tool, but i can't say i'm realy happy with it. I used it to do a sim on a tweel design i made for a friend. He wanted a tweel for his heavyweight combat robot (robotwars/battlebots). I would like to run some more simulations with other laods (shoould be easy enough) and other model settings in both orientation and disign alterations. But i fear it will take to many evenings to get that worked out.
Profesionaly i don't realy need (highend) simulations. I have only sparcely seen Inv. sim at presentations so i'n not quite sure how integrated that is in relation to the model and how it is setup and modiefied in Inv.
