2 posts tagged with "assembly2"

We’ve already talked about the need for a default assembly workbench in FreeCAD and reviewed Assembly 2. Now let’s get into the nitty-gritty of the A2plus workbench.

History​

A FreeCAD user kbwbe started working on this project in 2018 following experiments with a new solver developed on top of the pre-existing Assembly 2 workbench:

I developed a small prototype of yet another solver. It is in a very early state now and is only capable of handling plane/circularedge/axis-constraints. But it can easily be extended. It consists only of one file, which is attached. The base concept is inspired by physics. [...] It is just a prototype and many things are still missing. But the idea seems to work. I am working with a refurbished assembly2-workbench. I like the base concepts of it very much and did some bigger projects with it.

Having received initial feedback, kbwbe created a public repository on GitHub and continued hacking on the new workbench publicly.

Despite an activity plunge during the pandemic, A2plus is still being actively developed and receives new features and bug fixes.

Workflow and ease of use​

A2plus follows the same general idea as its predecessor: create parts as separate files, align them with constraints, solve. Just like Assembly 2, this workbench supports sub-assemblies. There are some differences though. The one that stands out immediately is that, rather than creating one constraint object in the project tree, A2plus creates references to the same constraint in both involved parts.

Another difference is that a part in A2plus is a special type of an object. So it’s possible to create a new part from within the workbench and fill it with objects e.g. in the Part Design workbench. But the part will have to be manually converted to an A2plus part to become usable in the workbench. The caveat here is that even then such a part will not be added to the BOM: only the parts imported from external files will be displayed there. Overall, the top-down design approach is not favored by A2plus, as earlier noted by kbwbe in the FreeCAD forum:

Leaving PartDesign bodies within the assembly is not the intended workflow. Best way is to import everything. Converting is also not the preferred way. Even all parametrics of the parts get lost.

Unlike Assembly 2, the A2plus workbench can also load user-selected objects from another FreeCAD project. In this case, the workbench will reference the object from the file, so FreeCAD will pick any changes made to the original project when you click the Update button.

In terms of general user experience, A2plus is a major improvement over Assembly 2. Here are some examples of user-visible changes:

• When features (points, planes etc.) of multiple parts are selected, the workbench automatically makes available only the constraints that can be used with these features. This removes a lot of guesswork for new users.
• Imported parts can easily be opened for editing as separate documents. All edited parts then can be updated with a single click.
• When cleaning up an assembly, it’s possible to easily delete all constraints associated with a part.

Features​

The workbench has a respectable set of constraints: Point-to-Point, Point-on-Line, Point-on-Plane, Sphere-to-Sphere, Circular-Edge, Axis-to-Axis, Axis-to-Plane, Axis-Plane-Normal, Angular Axis-to-Plane, Planes-Parallelism, Planes-Coincident, Angled-Planes, Center-of-Mass. This covers a variety of use cases.

A2plus comes with an autosolver. The way it works, however, is somewhat unreliable. Case in point: select two planes, create a Plane-Coincident constraint, solve, accept. Then select the constraint and change its Offset parameter in the Combo View. The autosolver will not update the position of the object that has the first plane, you will have to click the Solve button for this change to take effect.

There’s a number of convenience features specific to A2plus (as compared to Assembly 2) such as placing labels on parts in the viewport for easier navigation or making parts’ fills transparent. The behavior of A2plus is configurable. Settings are available in the Preferences dialog:

Some features of the original Assembly 2 workbench are unavailable. Notably, the animation of the assembly for collision analysis is missing.

The A2plus workbench has a good reference guide on FreeCAD’s wiki but lacks official tutorials that explain the workflow. The community, however, stepped up and provided a sufficient number of YouTube tutorials on using A2plus for a variety of use cases: mechanical design, woodworking, etc.

Update 2023-03-26: There is at least one documented case where the precision of the A2plus solver was not sufficient to get the job done. The workbench developer explained this by having to find a compromise between speed (responsiveness of the WB) and accuracy due to limited calculation power available to a solver written in Python.¹

Consistency​

A2plus does a few things differently from many other workbenches. The most user-visible difference is how constraint settings are displayed. When a new constraint is being added, FreeCAD displays a floating dialog:

Double-clicking the constraint in the project tree reopens this floating dialog. However, the very same information is displayed in the Combo View. So there’s two competing approaches to editing settings of a constraint.

Similarly, the first button in the Constraint toolbar opens another floating window that duplicates the list of constraints that is already available in that toolbar. This is not a common (although fairly optional-to-use) UI solution for FreeCAD.

As already noted, some objects require a conversion to an A2plus part, like the basic 3D objects created in the Part workbench. At the same time, this assembly workbench has no problem working with parts created in e.g. SheetMetal WB.

One important caveat of A2plus is that it doesn’t use the standard App::Link machinery to reference objects in other documents. Parts added to the document this way cannot be used in an assembly.

Some actions, like adding a part from an external file are not correctly added to the undo buffer so they cannot be reverted in the normal way.

Stability​

As of publishing this overview, there are no reported crashers that aren’t fixed. There haven’t even been many before: the issue tracker only lists 3 bugs in A2plus that ever crashed FreeCAD, and git log likewise lists only a few fixes for crashes. However, we were able to crash the program by pressing Ctrl+Z to undo while moving a part under constraints.

The main developer typically responds to bug reports within the first few days. There’s a small number of bug reports with mild severity from 2019 where either no detailed information was provided by the reporter, or the developer couldn’t replicate the issue, or the report slipped through developer’s fingers. The workbench occasionally exhibits inconsistent or glitchy behavior like failing to delete a conflicting constraint. Other than that, nothing particularly bad stands out.

Performance​

Assemblies are inherently complex beasts. It takes a substantial amount of talent, time, and effort to make a fast solver — a combination that not every volunteer has at their disposal. We’ve definitely seen complaints like this one about performance issues in the A2plus workbench even with fairly simple assemblies. However, in our limited testing, we were unable to come up with conclusive evidence for assemblies “blowing up” after changes. Simple assemblies (up to 40 parts) did not represent a major issue for A2plus. But there was noticeable rendering slowdown when moving parts under constraints.

At least one of the reasons for possible performance issues according to the main A2plus developer is the inefficient use of memory. This is how he explains it and goes on to give very useful hints about ways a programmer could deal with Python limitations:

Memory management using Python as a programming language is not that easy and some memory leaks cannot be completely avoided. Python is keeping a lot of internal lists, which are immortal and their memory is not given back to the system during the lifetime of the program. So it is not possible to delete no more used objects from memory directly, as it is possible with "C/C++". Every object, which is not used anymore, is deleted (or sometimes it is not for various reasons), from Python's garbage collector. The code can only be optimized in order to reduce memory consumption. (using slots, avoiding string concatenation etc). I will have a look at this next time, where it is possible. But this is a bunch of work and will need a lot of time. And it will never be perfect.

Development​

The main developer responds to proposed contributions rather fast: many PRs by drive-by contributors are merged within days of submission, sometimes on the same day. Just 1 out of 452 pull requests is sitting unapplied on GitHub.

In the fall of 2022, a new regular contributor joined the project. His activity now rivals that of kbwbe.

Unlike with the original Assembly 2 workbench that had zero releases, the main developer of A2plus regularly tagged releases until November 2022 (a total of 101 tags so far). Releases mostly represent one or two bug fixes.

Community​

A2plus has one of the longest dedicated threads in the forum. However, since 2021, the activity of discussions has noticeably decreased: just 16 messages in the main thread in 2021, and 12 messages in 2022. The reason for this is unclear but might indicate that the interest towards the workbench has been decreasing as users move to other options.

Summary​

A2plus represents a major improvement over the original Assembly 2 workbench in terms of both workflow, features, and usability. It has more types of constraints, more convenience features, and better supports single-user workflows. It’s also sufficiently stable and has two developers who actively merge patches from other contributors. At the same time, the workbench has some unconventional UX/UI solutions and is reportedly prone to performance issues that are not easily resolved.

Next up​

In the next installment, we’ll take a close look at Assembly 3, a workbench that actively uses a solver from another free/libre CAD program, SolveSpace.

This is part two of our series on the need for an integrated default assembly workbench for FreeCAD. Part One gives and introduction and explains our methods. In this part, we take a closer look at Assembly 2, one of the early approaches to adding this feature set to FreeCAD.

History​

A FreeCAD user publicly known as Hamish started this project in late 2014. This is the original announcement:

I have written an assembly workbench for FreeCAD v0.15, which I am posting here for everyone's perusal. [...] I realize that there is mostly likely heavy development on FreeCAD's inbuilt assembly wb, which i could have just used for my assembly needs. However since FreeCAD provides such an excellent environment for building custom wbs, I decided to rather write my own wb exactly tailored to my needs [...] Hope someone else finds the assembly2 wb useful

2015 was the most active year for the project. However, in 2016, the original developer stopped writing new code and the next maintainer, Roland Frank, passed away in 2017. Hamish and another contributor, kbwbe, continued merging occasional pull requests: bug fixes, a Newton solver, and a port to Python 3 to make the workbench generally supported by newer versions of FreeCAD.

Assembly2 Commit History

However, in 2018, kbwbe started working on a rewrite of Assembly 2 and eventually dropped out of contributing to this workbench. There have been no changes in the git repository since 2019.

Workflow and ease of use​

Assembly 2 only supports the bottom-up approach where you design and save parts as files and then import them for an assembly into a new FreeCAD project. It will read both FreeCAD, OBJ, IGES, and STEP files. The workbench expects that the user either enables the visibility of just one body in the design file or creates files with single-body parts. Sub-assemblies are possible, however.

Graber I3 model by Nemesis81

After importing, spatial constraints need to be added and solved. Imported parts can be manually updated when the linked original file changes. Overall, it’s a straightforward workflow: import multiple parts from respective files, select parts’ features, add constraints, solve, done.

Problems begin to arise when a change is required. Assembly 2 does not have a dynamic solver. So once you change something like a distance or an angle, you have to create a constraint anew. Moreover, only some features in the workbench support undo/redo.

Features​

Constraints available in Assembly 2 are limited to circular edge, plane, axial, angular (for planes), and spherical surface. There are a few tools to work with constraints like flipping their directions.

Once constraints are done and solved, you can animate degrees of freedom to check for clearances and collisions in any combination of their respective positions. Additionally, it’s possible to check the entire assembly for overlapping parts.

Assembly 2 also allows creating a list of parts, for which it uses the Drawing Dimensioning workbench by the same original developer. Which, in return, only works with page objects created with the Drawing workbench. It’s also possible to create one object from all or just the selected parts in an assembly to display them in a drawing. Notably, the Drawing workbench is now deprecated and replaced by the TechDraw workbench.

Consistency​

The way the user interface is organized is in line with the rest of FreeCAD. However, for people new to assemblies, watching a few tutorials on YouTube will be really helpful. Unfortunately, the documentation on the workbench in the FreeCAD’s wiki is scarce: it only lists available features and doesn’t provide any information on them that you wouldn’t be able to see in the tooltips of the actual user interface.

Assembly 2 can work with parts created in other workbenches like SheetMetal or parts created with ‘importer’ workbenches like KiCadStepUp or Fasteners. However, because it demands just one body to be visible in an imported project and does not allow choosing which body to import, placing an entire board into an enclosure will require a lot of time and patience.

The workbench also doesn’t follow the more recent trend of making 3rd party workbenches translatable.

Graber I3 model by Nemesis81

Stability​

Because this assembly workbench is not maintained, the issue tracker has been deactivated on GitHub. So there’s no aggregated information on bugs and their severity. When used with a recent version of FreeCAD, the workbench has various glitches. The general recommendation appears to be keeping a copy of an older FreeCAD version (typically, v0.16 or v0.17) around to open old files that use this assembly workbench. For new users, the recommendation is to try one of the newer assembly workbenches.

Performance​

Despite its simplicity, Assembly 2 can be very slow on medium-to-complex projects. One of the recommendations to deal with that is by creating sub-assemblies: effectively saving an assembly as a FreeCAD project, then importing it to another assembly. This removes some complexity from the project but reportedly does not solve all performance issues.

Moreover, the interference checker takes the simple road of trying all possible pairs, and this can go on for a very long time.

Development Status​

There have never been official versioned releases of Assembly 2. Active development on this workbench ceased in 2016-2017. This workbench has been unmaintained since 2019. One of its features (list of parts) depends on another unmaintained 3rd party workbench by the same original developer, and another feature (consolidation of objects) depends on a deprecated official workbench (Drawing).

Summary​

Assembly 2 is a fairly straightforward yet very barebone solution for creating assemblies. It imposes a particular way of organizing a project, has a limited set of constraints, requires either a lot of planning or a lot of manual work because of lacking a dynamic solver, relies on obsolete workbenches for some of its features, and has been unmaintained since 2019. As such, it has served its purpose well and is now generally considered superseded by A2plus, Assembly 3, and Assembly 4.

Next up​

In the next installment, we’ll take a close look at the major iteration of this workbench called A2plus.