Animating a cable

Hi all,

I'm struggling a little bit with this, so I thought I would throw it out to see if anyone has any brilliant ideas.

I'm working on an animation of a tool that I built to measures he ID and OD of steel pipe. The tool get's inserted in the pipe and the operator turns a crank on which are mounted laser sensors for measuring distance. A data acquisition system collects the data for post processing later.

There is a cable mounted to the end of the crank handle which is connected to a bag on the operator's shoulder. I've modeled the cable with a spline and swept it, but as the crank rotates through it's throw, the geometry of the spline can get quite unpredictable. Ideally I would like the length of the cable (spline) to remain constant with the loop in the cable changing as the crank turns.

Any bright ideas on how to reliably do this?

Thanks,

=========================================================================== Chris

Reply to
Chris Dubea
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It's amazing that most of the time once you verbalize the problem, the solution comes to you.

I created a sketch on the bag with a construction line perpendicular to the surface of the bag at a dimensioned distance, I then provided a construction line perpendicular to that. Then I created a sketch at the handle with a construction line concentric to the handle. I created a plane from the first perpendicular line and the end of the second point. Using this plane, I created a construction sketch which would be the loop of the cable with suitable dimensions (I provided a length of the vertical line coming from the handle. I then created a

3D sketch using the previous three sketches as lock down points.

It works fine as the handle goes around.

l8r =========================================================================== Chris

Reply to
Chris Dubea

Chris

This sounds great but I dont quite follow. Do you have a model I can dissect?

Ben

Reply to
Ben Eadie

I'll have to create one. The ass'y I'm currently working in has LOTS of parts ;>

Is your e-mail valid?

=========================================================================== Chris

Reply to
Chris Dubea

Chris

For the email just remove ".spamballs" without the quotes and it is valid. Thanks for your time!

Ben

Ben

Reply to
Ben Eadie

I'm slowly trudging my way through this one and have another one that has me flummoxed.

Part of the process of measuring this pipe is to use a paint pen to draw reference lines on the pipe. In this particular instance there are 16 lines drawn at equidistant angles.

I've managed to animate this by building a small cut feature on the pipe and then using an equation to make the length = to the distance of the pen from the end. However, how do I do the other 15? Doing it this way means all the existing marks will reset as the pen sweeps through it's stroke. You can't animate the cut length of a feature, I've tried that. What I want to show is the pen making 16 marks around the periphery.

Any brilliant ideas?

Thanks, =========================================================================== Chris

Reply to
Chris Dubea

I'm slowly trudging my way through this one and have another one that has me flummoxed.

Part of the process of measuring this pipe is to use a paint pen to draw reference lines on the pipe. In this particular instance there are 16 lines drawn at equidistant angles.

I've managed to animate this by building a small cut feature on the pipe and then using an equation to make the length = to the distance of the pen from the end. However, how do I do the other 15? Doing it this way means all the existing marks will reset as the pen sweeps through it's stroke. You can't animate the cut length of a feature, I've tried that. What I want to show is the pen making 16 marks around the periphery.

Any brilliant ideas?

Thanks, =========================================================================== Chris

Reply to
Chris Dubea

Sorry,

This was supposed to be attached to thread about animat>I'm slowly trudging my way through this one and have another one that >has me flummoxed.

=========================================================================== Chris

Reply to
Chris Dubea

Well,

In the immortal words of "brute force", I made a part which I inserted

16 times into the assembly. I keyed the individual stripe on the pipe to the location of this inserted part(s) via an equation. The parts are completely embedded in the pipe, so they are not visible, but I can control the mates of each parts correspondingly controlling the stripe.

Wow, this is ugly. But I now have control over the strip which allows me to "animate" it.

The neat part of all this is the animator doesn't play particularly nicely with sub-assemblies (or patterns BTW) so I've had to explode all the sub-assemblies that I needed to animate parts in. I've got a bazillion parts and corresponding mates to trudge through. This is going to be tedious.

=========================================================================== Chris

Reply to
Chris Dubea

Argh!

Animator in Swx 2005 doesn't like all the equations. Switching to the animator pane produces a CTD.

Any suggestions for clever ways to independently animate multiple stripes?

cd

Chris Dubea wrote:

Reply to
cdubea

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