assembly without solver

[Zolko]

The Part or Product container mentioned in the tutorial are equivalent to the Assembly container in Assembly3, which of course can be treated just as a part and added to other assemblies.

Instead of creating another object type (Product or Assembly) which will add confusion to the already confusing Part / PartDesign thingy, it would be much better to add the extra properties to Part (or PartDesign) : the Link and Element things are good concepts

[fosselius]

Yes its a fork, parts of it will hopefully/probably be merged next year, the fork deals with links, topological naming, assembly and more, its >50 000 lines of code that needs to be reviewed..

There are releases to be downloaded for mac/linux/windows in the github page.

The developer have recently slowed down, hopefully because he is waiting for the merge after the 0.18 release. Last i heard he was trying to find a way to finance his work so he could do it full time. Maybe he got a new job and do not have the time anymore?

You can reach him through his github account or here on the forum:
https://forum.freecadweb.org/memberlist ... le&u=12167

[easyw-fc]

OK, I'll try. Take my example of a hole and a screw. You have made a plate with a simple hole, and inserted a screw into your assembly placing it concentric with the edge of the hole. Nice. Later, you refine your design and you have put a chamfer at the entrance of the hole: PAF, the geometrical reference for the placement has disappeared.

This basic Assembly functionality could be already achieved using Assembly2 plus WB (A2p) and aligning the parts of the assembly without using any constraint at all...
you can align your parts of the assembly using i.e. the Aligner & Mover of Manipulator WB...
Then if you modify a Part of the assembly, just clicking on the updating parts button of A2p will update the assembly giving the desired result ...
A2p will do all your job even if you don't add any constraint at all... A2p will keep the absolute position of your parts (your LCS concept) in your assembly just because no constraints are added ...

[Zolko]

This basic Assembly functionality could be already achieved using Assembly2 plus WB (A2p) and aligning the parts of the assembly without using any constraint at all... you can align your parts of the assembly using i.e. the Aligner & Mover of Manipulator WB

That doesn't work for 3 reasons:

• the a2p workbench creates copies of objects, doesn't link them. Assembly3 does make links, that's the proper way to do it
• I don't want to move objects by hand, but I want to place them to places (vertices for example) that I have pre-determined, and that are parametric.
• I want to be able to re-use parts I have created, and such parts can have different use cases, needing different attachment points (think of a wheel that can be attached on both sides of the axis)

Now that I have discovered that proper LCS do exist, the missing part in all this is the Link part from the Assembly3 branch. With that it should be quite easy to implement

[easyw-fc]

That doesn't work for 3 reasons:

Only the first point related to links is not available on A2p, the others are feasable.. You need to play with a WB before dropping it

[Zolko]

Only the first point related to links is not available on A2p, the others are feasable.

that's the most important one (for me)

[easyw-fc]

that's the most important one (for me)

But that is not what makes an assembly.

[Zolko]

But that is not what makes an assembly.

already answered in the thread:

Otherwise, you get these disagreements on what an assembly “really” is

[fosselius]

I would argue that links is one of the most important core functionality for an assembly, in a way more important then constraints.

For parametically placing objects in an "assembly", you can do much with part/body and the spreadsheet workbench. You can also have an body in an body, this nesting can be powerful for linkage.
See https://youtu.be/BV_oCienirU

[Zolko]

I would argue that links is one of the most important core functionality for an assembly, in a way more important then constraints.

I agree. When you have hundreds/thousands of screws (and that comes fast), you don't want a copy for each.