My boss wants me to make an assembly of a door that anyone, with no knowledge of pro-e, can modify to extract information. What we have is a large door with hydraulic rams, and he wants to know how much travel is left in the ram when the door is at full open, and he wants to be able to drag it, so the ram must be a sliding or cylinder assembly. I plan on using the Parameters as the "user input" section. The problem I've run into is the fact that for different size doors we use different length and stroke of rams, going in steps. I can make the ram components longer using relations and If Else statements, but how can I make the travel longer? I limited the ram travel using limits in the "Translation Axis" portion of the assembly. Is there a way to get colliding parts to act like colliding parts so they stop that way?
WF3 has, supposedly, added collision detection, but I couldn't find it. I'm sure I've also set geometry limits on motion that amounted to hard stops. When you set up a servo motor, there are two radio buttons, one picked by default that lets you pick the translation axis and the other that lets you pick geometry. Have you tried setting limits, probably planar, maybe to planes built at the ends of the piston, for setting geometry limits? I can't recall exactly how its done, but I'm pretty sure I did it with a piston such as you're describing. Too bad nobody's here from Cat Hydraulics; I'm pretty sure their engineering department set up what you're describing to regenerate new cylinders with Pro/PROGRAM, just by inputting some numbers. Since then, Pro/e's added the ability to drag packaged components, even when not in Mechanism Design. Add geometry limits to that and it's probably all you'd need to do what you're trying.
David Janes