Planetary gears in Fusion 360 - plugin (update)

Hello Fusion designers. In this video I’ll show a new version of planetary gears maker which comes with new useful features. Plugin will be available at Autodesk App Store in two weeks. Links both for iOS and Windows will be put below the video. If you like this, please thumbs up and subscribe the channel. Differences visible at first sight are on UI.

00:34 - On the top there appeared a “Menu” section which contains: save, load and reset buttons moved from bottom of the form, switches for preview (with or without descriptions), switches for working with profile shifting (P0 - “zero”, automatic, manual), switch for adding revolute joints. In the “Planet” section there’s additional field for set center distance manually when manual profile shifting is chosen. “Chamfers” section now has icons instead of checkbox. All fields have better descriptions and toolclips (images) when you hover cursor over them. At the very bottom there’s an estimated time calculated based on last 100 runs.

01:19 - When you run the plugin for the first time there will be no information about time because no statistics have been recorded yet. Estimated time is rounded up to first 10 seconds. Now you can also cancel the process by clicking the button when the progress window is shown. Ok, so let’s go into more details and show this in action. The biggest changes are under the hood. First of them is the new way of creating tooth’s profile. Now it’s more accurate, no matter tooth has undercut or not. According to this “root fillet radius” for separate gears is no longer available and the only thing to set is the clearance factor in the main section. Second improvement are modes of profile shifting. In the first mode (P0) there’s no profile shifting and the number of ring’s teeth are calculated automatically. It is the simplest and fastest mode for those of you who don’t need to use shifting and only interested of zero profiles.

02:27 - Second mode lets you slightly enlarge the ring gear (max. 2 teeth more) but shift factors are calculated automatically. Probably in most cases it won’t hit the optimal surface strength of teeth but it’s the best choice for those of you who only need the contact between gears. There’s also third mode if you want to set every coefficient and modified center distance manually. Center distance in this mode is located under the “Planet” section. Back to the UI I also mentioned few other features. Preview is something which you let to see how big the model will be. It only displays cylinders and transparent rings instead of teeth but it’s enought to see most important dimensions. In addition to this, there are texts with dimensions and rings. Bold rings represents working pitch diameters and thin ones root and outside diameters.

03:24 - The biggest size of ring gear always equals root diameter + 2 modules and in the plugin it is called as “great diameter”. When gears set is ready you can easily modify it by pushing the outer surface or cut by smaller ring body. In case of auto and manual profiling there will be two working pitch diameters for planet. It’s ok because relation sun-planet and planet-ring will be different from mathematical point of view. You can also click the third icon of preview mode which shows basic parameters for gears. Unfortunately, preview can be overlapped by existing bodies. The same situation occurs when you change the view for parameters they can be covered by the gears’ model. When set is ready, you probably want to check its behaviour in motion. For making this faster, there is an option for adding joints for each gear. The only thing you need to do is to click the checkbox “Add joints?” in the “Menu” section.

05:18 - Moreover, each component contains all parameters and motion link formulas in their description. For example, if you want to define a motion link between the sun and ring, you can copy description, find a proper rule (sun = input, planet = fixed, ring = output) and paste it to the second gears field formula in the motion links window. Motion links cannot be handled by the API but in presented way you can achieve this faster than by hand. Another thing which may be useful are axes. Based on them you can quickly find the exact center of gear when drawing sketches. The last thing is estimation time.

07:28 - File used for calculating this will be created right after the first gears set will be finished. It is located in the plugin’s directory in your Fusion 360 installation folder. New version supports backward compatibility so if you have some files with saved parameters you don’t need to worry that they won’t be read. Only thing to do will be probably change of theirs values when they exceeds ranges, nothing else. As I mentioned, new version should be available soon.

09:25 - Updates of other plugins are also underway so stay tuned and see you next time. Bye. .