The relative motion between two components is assigned six degrees of freedom: three translational directions and three rotational directions. As you assign constraints to the components, you restrict the number of available degrees of freedom. For example, if you assign a revolute-type engineering connection to a body, you restrict its movement to a rotation about a single axis, and the DOF are reduced from six to one. Before you create engineering connections for your mechanism, you should know what movement you want to restrict and what movement you want to allow. A mechanism can be simulated by assigning values to unconstrained DOF and investigating the resulting configuration of the model; values are assigned to unconstrained DOF using commands. The Mechanism Manager—available from the Mechanism Editor toolbar—provides information about the DOF in your mechanism:
You can run a simulation when all DOF are accounted for by either engineering connection constraints or commands. In some cases a single command can account for multiple linked DOF. | |||||||||