Does anybody have experience with "CircuitWorks" for SolidWorks

We use it here. I don't do the translation, but I can tell you where it helps: No measuring boards, mounting hole locations, or height of components is great for designing.

The file comes in as an assembly, I would suggest saving/converting it to a part file. especially if you have a PDM system. That way you don't have to check in hudreds, if not thousands, of PDB components into your vault.

Look into it. It could be well worth it on time savings.

I found that saving the PCA assembly as a part didn't work out very well. I thought that it would speed up the final assembly to have just one PCA part to handle instead of a thousand individual parts in the subassembly. It actually made it considerably slower. Plus I lost over an hour each time I converted the assembly into a part. It's no big deal to have the added parts in the PDM system, so I went back to that method.

We use Altium instead of CircuitWorks, but the issue was the way SolidWorks handled the parts, so it shouldn't make any difference which link you use.

Jerry Steiger

Have a look at Protel. I worked for a company for 3 years, where this was used. The electrical engineers liked it. It plugs into solidworks and PDMworks. We used it for design, and also for control of manufacturing BOM's. Did lots of work with different configs, and new revision roll-outs. From memory, the check-in procedure was a bit klunky for Protel native files, but this might be fixed up a bit now.

Dom.

I use PCAD for pcb design. and then use "CircuitWorks" to create a 3D model of the PCB from PCAD. Works great for me. I have an older version of "CircuitWorks" and it works OK with the latest version of Solidworks. But I do need to get the Boss to approve an upgrade of "CircuitWorks". If you have any specific questions, let me know. Cheers Frank

MGR@Mart> I have got an email from my boss telling me to look at this

Altium is the new name for Protel.

Jerry Steiger