From the course: Autodesk Inventor: Configurable Designs and Automation

Overview of the data sets - Inventor Tutorial

From the course: Autodesk Inventor: Configurable Designs and Automation

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Overview of the data sets

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- [Instructor] Throughout this course, we will be using a couple of datasets. One will be just a simple plate, which we'll create from scratch, and that will be very self-explanatory. But for much of the course, we'll be using a configurable step ladder. If you notice, by the end of our course, we will have created a way to have multiple configurations of the same ladder that you see right there. And it's important that as we do work on this, you understand the major components. So first we have the frame assembly. And this really is one of the most important assemblies for the whole step ladder. This determines the size of it. It determines the width of it. And it really just consists of the frame itself, a rod that supports it and holds one of the platform plates that we'll put on later, and it also has a couple of footpads so that it can rest nice and easy on the floor. Moving towards the back, we have the rear frame assembly. And this is dual rods that go down, and they have a sheet metal component on top that joins that to the front frame. And then we have a couple of rods that give it some stability. On the top, we have our platform. And the platform is basically just a sheet metal part that fits right there on the two rod assemblies at the top of our step ladder. And then of course, we have one of our most important components which are the steps. And because our step ladder has some angle that goes on with that front frame, every step will change in its width depending on its height, and we'll get into how that's calculated in just a moment. Now it's also good to know some of the important parameters. Because as we're working on our models, you're going to see a lot of parameter names come up over and over again. Here we have the front frame height, and really that's measuring the overall height of that front frame that we created, and we showed on the previous slide. Then we have the front angle, and we're always going to make that 20 degrees for all of the models that we work on in this class. And we also have the rear angle, which is also going to be fixed for all of the models at 15 degrees. Now moving towards the front view, the ladder base width is the width of our ladder from the bottom where it touches the floor. Then we have the front frame angle, which is that taper angle as we go up. And you can see that that means that all of our steps then become different widths as we go up the ladder. Then we have our platform height. And our platform height, basically, determines how high that goes up off the ground. And then every stair has it's own individual height. And we have the stair width. Now oftentimes when we're sending parameters later in this course between different files, you'll notice that our step is set up so that if we give it certain parameters, it will automatically adjust to be the right length. And how we basically do that is we base it on the ladder base width right here. We look at this front angle that we have right here on our front frame, and then we look at how high the step is. And based on that, you can see we basically create this little triangle. And this triangle allows us to perform trigonometric functions so that we can calculate this delta step width. So depending on the angle of our front frame, depending on how high it is, and depending on the ladder base width, we can calculate this delta step, and we can calculate exactly what that length should be no matter where it is. And it was easier just to do that through formulas than trying to figure it out manually every single time we wanted to create a new version of the step ladder.

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