Connectors

Overview

Connectors are wrapper components that make other Dynamic Components functional within a cabinet or drawerbox. You can write your own Dynamic Component, create a connector for it, put it inside a cabinet or drawer box and have it change dimensions as you move parts around in the cabinet.

You can take a CabinetSense cabinet, add shelves and partitions, and place it in a drawer box and use it as a cutler tray or spice rack pullout. Attach a door to the connector instead and you now have the ability to add doors to the back, side and top of your CabinetSense cabinets.

To create a connector, simply right-click on the cabinet (or user created dynamic component) and select Create Connector. Save the resulting new component to your library for use later on.

Attributes

• Overides: (width, depth, height)
  • Overides will force the component to become the dimension specified, even it means that it becomes larger than the component that it resides within. For example, specifying a width of 40" will make the connector that wide, even if the drawer box that it resides in is less than that value.
  • Leaving the overide at 0, ensures that the component will be the exact size of its parent part.
• Placement: This grouping determines how your component will be placed inside its parent.
  • Align: This attribute controls whether the connector will have it's back (or front) against it's parents outside edge. This attribute only has meaning when the depth of the connector has been overidden.
  • Here is a connector object that has it's depth set to 100mm with alignment to the front.

• Now, the directions of left, right, top, bottom, width, depth... all make sense.
• When you're done editing, turn Edit Assist off to return to the component back to its desired state.
• Insets: (left, right, top, bottom, front, back) Insets are used in two ways depending whether an overide has been used. Regardless of it's use, CabinetSense takes no responsibility for determining if the inset value is proper. If you declare an inset value that is greater than the dimension of the component, the resulting dimension will be negative.
  • When no overides are in place, an inset will shrink the dimension(s) of the component by the inset value.
  • Here is a shelving component with no width specified. Because it is facing right, it's normal width would be the depth of its parent. Because we have entered a left inset of 100mm, the shelving unit shrinks in size by the inset and the left edge moves inward by 100mm.

• Axis Overlap: In a perfect world, everything "just works". Unfortunately the world isn't perfect and sometimes you have to nudge it along.
  • an overlap corrects things when you notice that you can't place your connector correctly, or it doesn't respond properly to scaling.
  • The only time when you should have to add an overlap is when you have a connected component whose x and/or y axis is outside the bounds of the parents dimensions.
  • Look at the XRack component below.
  • notice that the bottom left hand corner of the rack is outside of the normal dimensions of the parent cabinet. This is due to the way the rack dynamic component was developed. In this situation, you would need to overlap values to both the x and y axis to ensure that the part can be placed, moved and scaled easily.
  • The amount of overlap is a guestimate, but I have found using a value of twice the actual overlap works out nicely.

Associated Machining

Connector components can transfer machining to their host cabinet. Door hinging, adjustable shelf pin holes, drawer slide holes, mechanical fasteners, and dadoes.

Simply drop in the connector component and machining transfers automatically. Now your engineers can design ready-to-use components and your designers can do what they do best… DESIGN!!!

Here’s a sampling of what can be done…

Drop in the two connectors… and you’re ready to manufacture.

Use the Preview drilling option to see what will be machined.