Help needed setting up a customisable assembly

[Anonymous]

My company design and manufacture hot water cylinders. These cylinders have a lot of variables such as diameters, heights, and material.

So far, i have drawn each individual item that make up the cylinder, which also have variables like sizes, materials etc. These are welded onto the cylinder in our factory, and have designated heights. They are assigned to a degree as well if you image looking down at a cylinder from a birds eye view. (I have attached a drawing as an example of what the end result will look like)

Every time we receive an order for a special cylinder i have to make constraints in an assembly to create the cylinder from scratch.

Is there anyway i can use parameters or ilogic or something to select certain parts to appear in the assembly, assign them a height on the cylinder and assign them a position using planes? I recently saw use of forms which looked very useful but being a novice i'm not sure how i would go about doing this. I would also like to link it with an excel document so it can be transferred into other systems we have here.

What i really want is to be able to select the capacity of cylinder i require, then a diameter, which parts i would like on the cylinder, material, etc. Is this doable?

Any suggestions, guides, or examples of how i can achieve this are welcomed.

[mcgyvr · Accepted solution]

Start your reading/learning here..

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/inventor-products/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2014...

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/inventor-products/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016...

Thats what Inventor can do out of the box without any "programming" experience..

Sound like some custom ilogic might be more along the lines of what you want and could basically be done to completely put you out of work where any monkey can just enter 1000G and 10 for a diameter and boom.. Everything is done including drawings.. 

Its probably more of what you really want but iparts/iassemblies can get pretty close too..

I'm sure the more ilogic focused guys will be along shortly to showoff what they can do too and hopefully steer you in the right direction of a good tutorial or something for that..

youtube is full of good stuff on that too.. 

[Curtis_Waguespack]

Hi jaccalvert,

Here's a good AU paper that covers the basics of using ilogic for this kind of thing:

http://aucache.autodesk.com/au2013/sessionsFiles/1673/932/handout_1673_DV1673-L%20The%20Decoding%20L...

http://au.autodesk.com/au-online/classes-on-demand/class-catalog/classes/year-2013/product-design-su...

Once you dig into this you can ask programming questions of this type on the Inventor Customization forum too:
http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/Autodesk-Inventor-Customization/bd-p/120

I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com

[Anonymous]

You have to find a relation ship between dimensions, for example d=1000, so 900=d*90/100, I dono how much variables there, any how the idea that when you change the parameter d, the others will be changed.

or determine the size that have to be changed most of time and create iparts, and then iassemblies, there will be a table there, so you can change the required parts into the assembly

about the exporting parts list data to excel, there is an icon at the parts list dialog box, where it exports them to excel

Hope it helps you as a start

Regards

Eng.Ebrahim