FIRST Robotics - Learn Solidworks Assemblies with TriMech - 5. In-Context Design.

"Welcome back to the Rolling Robot Series. If you just joined our series we are creating this rolling robot chassis. In this episode we are going to create the mounting plate for our motor and wheel assembly. Using Top Down modeling we will design the mounting plate with our motor model to ensure perfect hole alignment . Create Motor Mounting plate. Right click on the subassembly and select open. Now we have isolated our motor corner. Now we are ready to begin creating our motor mounting plate. To create the mounting plate, click the drop down under insert component and select New Part. next click a face to place the new part. I click the back face on our transmission housing. This places me in an active sketch in the new part. First, I choose offset entities to create a clearance cutout around the motors. I’ll use 0.75mm as the offset distance. Next, I select the outer edges of the motors to create the cutouts. Use a section view to remove motor housings from the view. Go normal to the sketch. Let’s work on the cutout for the encoder bracket. I select the left edge of the encoder mount, then right click, select tangency. This selects all the edges that are connected and tangent. Click convert entities. Our selection turns to lines. Repeat this on the other side. Next, select the encoder circular face and convert entities. Use the power trim tool to clean up this unwanted geometry. Click ok. Now I want to create the plate boundaries. I’ll begin with a corner rectangle. The bottom left corner will be coincident to the top of the corner gusset. We want the motor mounting plate nice and compact. I’ll add a colinear relationship to the top edges of the rectangle and motor housing. I use two 21mm overhangs to define the plate width. This gives my 20mm extrusion a mounting place. My plate is now fully defined. I’ll extrude our rectangular profile 3/16”. There are 4 closed profiles in the sketch, so make sure the correct profile is selected. I need to add four 10mm fillets to the outer corners. I select my first corner to fillet, by hovering I trigger the edge selection toolbar pop-up. Select the option connected to start loop-3 edges. Solidworks applies the fillet to all 4 corners. Click on the section view to turn it off. I need to add the mounting holes to the plate. I preselect the back face of our motor plate and select hole wizard. Tip: By pre-selecting the face we force our hole wizard holes go through the face. I want to add 4 holes. use screw clearances for Ansi #12 screws through the plate. Now I select our positions tab to place the holes. I switch my view to hidden lines visible to reveal the motor mounting holes. Tip: Hover over the circular edges to wake up the midpoints and I place four clearance holes. Click ok. I will repeat the previous steps to create 3/8” clearance holes for our encoder standoff. Changing back to shaded with edges I can verify my geometry does not have any interference. Rename the mounting plate and save it to an external file. Creating parts within an assembly is an effective way to validate your design while modeling. When your design is finished you can confidently begin production. Join me next time as create our corner uprights. These uprights will be critical for joining the lower and upper frame and mounting the motor plate. Thanks for tuning into the series Rolling Robots – I’ll see you in the next episode. "