How far did you go with ilogic

[tolgay.hickiran]

Hello everyone,

This threas is rather opened out of curiosity. We've been focused really hard on parametric modelling for 5 months now and we've fully modeled 2 5k+ item parametric assemblies with drawings and necessary lists. The first assembly took us around 2 months to build and we've deeply learned how to improve ilogic rules and global parameter usage.

We are a company which produces powder paint curing ovens and all other powder paint process machinery(www.electron.com.tr ). I can share some model pictures if anyone is interested how the assembly works and updates with parameters.

The assemblies have around 200 rules in total for main assembly sub assemlies and parts. We simply give around 10 parameters (like the curing oven length or the process piece width) and the entire assembly updates around 5 minutes. Before this the design time would have taken us 5 working days with all lists included.

Ilogic is a really strong tool for us and we are really keen on meeting and talking with people who are using ilogic to its full power.

I believe this is the way of doing things now, automating the design just like automating the manufacturing processes.

We would like to see how the world is using ilogic on design automation. Cheers

[salariua]

loving all engineering I wouldlike to see some images and how the product updates with ilogic....

[Jef_E]

Hi,

I'm very interested to see some pic's or maybe a screencast of the tool working?

As for iLogic, how far did I go.. I made a customizable model for process columns. It does not have 5k parts but close to 1k. All parts are changed in size after the process is finished. Takes about 15 minutes for me.. for example it can be a 1 meter high vessel of a 100 meter one. It's all generated from the same model.

Now we are changing the process, to improve speed, user interaction, and precise adjusting of part after the generation is done. For this new process I did not look at iLogic, tackled the AddIn hurdle. At first I was not 100% convinced this was the way to go. But when I got the hang of it seems to be better. I'm now almost done creating the required code to process all basic requirements and the speed is improved a lot. Also because we went from top-down to bottom-up modeling.

I found the iLogic rule editor not quite sufficient as no debug is available. And no suggestions while typing are made. Other sad part for me is the user interaction, the form is not customizable based on the user input. Yes you can set options read-only etc. But add controls during run-time is not possible.

So for my conclusion: iLogic is OK, but not 100% satisfying for my needs. Plus some customers of ours ask for native Inventor files to place in their environment, with iLogic these rules are sent with the files..

[Anonymous]

Jay,

How far did we go. Well for me I am just begining to really get into iLogic. Interface is ok. As for what I've done with iLogic, well we manufacture trailers (complete), chassis, and bodies for trucks. In both steel and aluminnum, both for bodies, trailer bodies and chassis. Our aluminum products require a lot of custom extrusions. As for the steel, we use many standard shapes. I've been tasked with modeling (for lack of a better term) blanks of our base or standard models ranging from 22' to 53' long (2' increments), with 48" to 102" high sides (6" increments), in both steel and aluminum. The biggest task has been going back and writing some pretty basic code (basic now that I've learned how, thanks to many on this site) to insure that the part description field is filled out automatically and updates with changes. This has to take place without the need for me to go back and manually change that information. That is still a work in progress. But I've also made some standard assembly models of the basic components like sides, tailgates, bulkheads and floors that are driven by iLogic code to change length and height from an ilogic form. Haven't made it to the chassis yet, but the bodies are coming along well. I've been coding for the last 2 weeks and am amazed at how far this project has progressed.

    Some of the key elements for me have been logical parameter names. This helps in finding the parameters when creating your iLogic code. Also, how you create your part files (symetry on the origin planes when possible). And how your parts are constrained in the assembly model. Using multi-values for things like length, width, height and thickness. Also using these names for parameters. It's very important to put alot of thought into these things before you start as  this helps things go much smoother. It's easier to do this work up front than it is to have to go back and do it right when in the middle of writing the iLogic code. Also, when you need help, this is a great place to find it. Best of luck to all and have a great weekend.

Frank

[tolgay.hickiran]

salariua, we are going to create a small video demonstration and show what we are doing.

Jef, 15 minutes is a long time i must say. It obviously depends on how you are doing your modelling. What we experienced while we are doing the design is the build a "skeletal" model which is on the "phantom" and create many crucial parameters on this. Your crucial parameters must be located on the top level assemblies to make the entire process faster.

frank, awesome stuff, we also have some of our parts "standard" like our curing oven panels being manufactured in the same fashion. Though there are a lot of whatifs with the geometry say like;

- Your customer doesn't have enough space, what would you do? Your panel size is 300mm but you need to create a 140mm one because of the space constraint. We also programmed for these situations etc. We really don't have a "standard" design, but rather a really big parametrically distributed one.

[tolgay.hickiran]

Here's a small demonstration of how one of our parametric assemblies work, note that this only includes the 3d model. We didn't show the linked drawings in this video. The form language is Turkish but it should be understandable.

[Anonymous]

At the moment i'm doing an internship within a company that develops machinery for the composting industry. For one of the machines I designed a parametric model with a few parameters and the option to include or exclude some extra modules. Never worked with Inventor or iLogic before and learned a lot by reading this forum. Up until now the model, BOM and technical drawings change automatically and DXF files of all sheet metal parts are produced. So i'm pretty satisfied with the result.

So one question, what do you think is the best way to set up a parametric model? Suppressing, visibility, replacing parts, make part families, iParts/iAssemblies? Didn't try them all but had a hard time with suppressing components.  

[Anonymous]

Hi all
As my colleague (jayjay_ice) says we have tried so many ways to create our design but in my opinion you should use suppressed parts for your design
Because it is the easy way for programming but you should change and FIX the level of detail in ilogic not on tree.
Also you can use visible status for part list(in drawing). Visible status is really easy for your design but it can changable, you should always check or fix in ilogic. Otherwise we are ready to help and share our ideas with you guys just keep in touch with us  🙂

[Anonymous]

Jay,

Nicely done. Very similar to what I'm doing. Would you mind sharing how you made your video? Thanks again for your help.

Cheers,

    Frank

[tolgay.hickiran]

Hey Frank,

Sure we used teamviewer to capture the screenplay and then formatted it with another video conventer, lastly we used windows movie maker to make the sequences. Really easy to do. If you need help let us know

[Anonymous]

Hi Frank

We want to see your design pics or video. All this proceses which we fight we needed to see example of ilogic design.We create our program style. Maybe we are using laisy way maybe we can create Voltran 🙂  

[Anonymous]

Umut,

   Still working on how to do a video of my iLogic driven Assembly. Hopefully in the next week or so.

But here are some tips to help. I've begun saving some of my code under custom snippets. This has made things go much faster. As I catch myself creating the same code over and over, I save it to the Custom snippets section on the iLogic interface. I have also placed the 2 rules I use the most in my template files for part and sheet metal templates. These template files also contain user parameters required in the rules. This has saved me a ton of time. So next time I create a part or sheet metal part everything I need is already in place, ready to go.

    I will be sure to post the video here when I get it done. Might use my web cam to record it. I know that isn't the best option, but it will show you what I've done. If you want, I can also post the code that drives it. The turning point for me with iLogic was seeing code examples of real world use. Most of the training videos I watched were theoretical application and didn't do me any good.

    Well keep using iLogic as much as you can and it will get easier.

Cheers,   Frank 

[Anonymous]

Umut,

I hope this works this time. This should be a link to a video showing some of what I've done with iLogic driving assembly models.

Frank

[tolgay.hickiran]

As i'm watching your video frank, i thing comes up to mind. There could be another way to the bigger assemblies, maybe to split "main assembly" forms into 5 - 6 pieces and solve for every single one of them, it might take less time to compute for the whole assembly, but ofcourse 5 minutes for a 5k+ assembly is acceptable anyway.

Good work frank. Happy to see programming in design!

[Jef_E]

---

@Anonymous_ice wrote:
but ofcourse 5 minutes for a 5k+ assembly is acceptable anyway.

---

How many parts get changed in size of those 5k?

[tolgay.hickiran]

Around 200 unique parts are in the assembly i shared on the video, almost all of them change because there is almost always a "non standard" variation of the part.

[Jef_E]

---

@Anonymous_ice wrote:
Jef, 15 minutes is a long time i must say.

---

Then my 15 minutes isn't that long 🙂 got +-600 unique parts in there that all change 😄

[tolgay.hickiran]

Heh, you might be right depending on your assembly rules of course 🙂

[Anonymous]

Gentlemen,

    For what it's worth, I have broken my primary assemblies into 5 sub assemblies. Left and right sides, floor, bulkhead, and tailgate. Some models of our trailers do have a roof, most do not. And then of course there is the chassis which has so many options that vary by customer specifications, I'm not even thinking about automation for them at this point. But learning to use iLogic (and by learning, of course I know I 'm not even scratching the surface yet)

has been a huge step forward in my current project. This site has been and continues to be my biggest resource for learning iLogic. I can't begin to thank you all enough. Looking forward to returning the favor as much as I can. Thanks again for all the help.

Frank

[Jef_E]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

    For what it's worth, I have broken my primary assemblies into 5 sub assemblies. Left and right sides, floor, bulkhead, and tailgate. Some models of our trailers do have a roof, most do not.

---

(As I earlier stated that the iLogic interface is lacking a good user interface.)

I now use the same approach as @Anonymous I divided my model into sub-assemblies that are configure-able separately. For doing this intuitive I created my own browser object in the inventor application using an AddIn.

When the user selects a sub-assembly, the user gets shown all available controls for that sub-assembly and can edit from the main assembly level without having to open/edit the sub-assembly. This saves some clicks! I'm not fully finished on creating my UI, they currently got me swamped with creating shop drawing that are urgent.

Example is this generic nozzle I created. The user can insert a full copy by 1 push on the right button and then edit it via the browser. This is shown from the sub-assembly level. But when selected in the main assembly the interface is identical.