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Custom units on a drawing

Custom units on a drawing

Custom units on a drawing

(OP)
We have a situation where we would like to create a drawing in milliradians. Milliradians are a simple calculation of inverse tangent of rise over run where rise is the actual linear dimension, run is a constant we already have, and then multiply the whole thing by 1000 to get the “milli” part.

My question: Is there a way to have a print where all the dimensions are a result of a calculation [or formula] like the one I’m talking about above since 'milliradians' are not a selectable unit in SolidWorks?

Let me know if this clear enough. Maybe for now we could simply the formula to “multiply by 2”, or whatever, and ask the same question; although we will need an inverse tangent function to pull this off.

Thanks for your input guys,
Jack

Jack Lapham, CSWP
Engr Sys Admin
Dell M6400 Covet (24 Season 8, Ep 22)
Intel Core 2 Duo T9800, 2.93GHz, 1066MHZ 6M L2 Cache
8.0GB, DDR3-1066 SDRAM, 2 DIMM
1Gb nVIDIA Quadro FX 3700M (8.17.12.5896)
W7x64 | sw-01: 55.92
SolidWorks 2012 sp3 x64 & EPDM sp2

RE: Custom units on a drawing

If you want to apply this to actual angular dimensions, it is possible to set up your drawing to use radians as the unit of angular measurement. However, I do not see a way to automatically get the factor of 1000.

If:
  1. You are actually wanting to display linear dimensions as milliradians.
  2. Your run is constant over the entire drawing
  3. Your run is much larger than your rise
You could use the approximation that for small x, tan(x) is approximately x. If x=80 miliradians, atan(x) * 1000 = 79.8. If x=50 miliradians, atan(x) * 1000 = 49.96. If x=30 miliradians, atan(x) * 1000 = 29.991. If the approximation is close enough over the range of values that you have, then you can add a scale feature to the part being dimensioned (1000 / run) and the linear dimensions would then be mapped to miliradians.

Eric

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