IDEAS Advanced Programmability essays

IDEAS Advanced Programmability essays DEPARTMENT OF INDUSTRIAL AND MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS ENGINEERING I-DEAS ADVANCED PROGRAMMABILITY FEATURE: Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Computer-Aided Design and Manufacturing Utilizing the advanced programmability features of the I-DEAS software package, it is possible to create a macro to run within the I-DEAS modeling environment that would automatically generate commonly used parts or geometries to supplement and speed up the modeling process. To define a macro within I-DEAS a user may simply capture the commands through a Program File -> Create option, create the program file directly through any text editor or use a combination of the two methods. Currently I-DEAS allows the user to retrieve various primitives from the Parts Catalog to aid and speed up the modeling process, but this does not account for more complex geometries that maybe repeated quite often in various modeling applications. Quite often these geometries, although commonly used for one particular company are in actuality company specific and do not warrant their inclusion in the mainstream I-DEAS Parts Catalog. Since creating the geometry from scratch would prove to be too time consuming and including company specific geometries within the Parts Catalog is not feasible, I-DEAS has created two options for defining parameterized complex geometries: (1) define a macro (which I-DEAS calls program files) to prompt the user for parametric information from the command-line interface and generate the geometry using predefined commands programmed within the macro or (2) create the part geometry manually and use the parameterized parts option to store the par ...