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Hi everyone,
Does anybody have any ideas on how we can get our high density and large board from Altium into SolidWorks while optimising PC performance?
If possible, we would prefer a method that doesn't compromise too much detail.
What we've tried:
The two different plugins that claim to do this aren't on the table at this time but I'm still open to hearings about other people's experiences.
Does anybody have any other ideas? How is this done for large motherboards and graphics cards? I know for a fact that there are larger and more dense boards than ours out there. And our computers aren't exactly low grade.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Kind regards,
Dan
Does anybody have any ideas on how we can get our high density and large board from Altium into SolidWorks while optimising PC performance?
If possible, we would prefer a method that doesn't compromise too much detail.
What we've tried:
Step and Parasolid files on a board this size destroy SolidWorks. Parasolid works much better than Step, but both make our mechanical engineer's very sad.
It's funny how the number of duplicate IC models seems to correlate to how much precious board space they take away 😂. Jokes aside though, these files are unworkable.
We also tried using Altium's IDF Board exporter with several different file formats. These take a very long time to import into SolidWorks, but once there, we can save the files as a SolidWorks part which is the most optimised solution that we've seen for PC performance. However, the component bodies get expanded to cover the legs and whatever other details. e.g. the bodies are just bounding boxes (as intended by the file format). Since our moulds need to wrap tightly around components, this solution doesn't work. It's common for us to need to know where the component body ends so that we can place a mould section next to it, sitting above its legs. Or sometimes, we need to align a flex board with an FPC connector.
We are going to try importing the step file into Blender overnight (or maybe we have to convert it to a mesh file first), decimate the file, and then try importing the result into SolidWorks. This method will reduce a lot of the detail, but shouldn't be as bad as the IDF files. I will post how this test goes once the mechanical engineers have done it.
It's funny how the number of duplicate IC models seems to correlate to how much precious board space they take away 😂. Jokes aside though, these files are unworkable.
We also tried using Altium's IDF Board exporter with several different file formats. These take a very long time to import into SolidWorks, but once there, we can save the files as a SolidWorks part which is the most optimised solution that we've seen for PC performance. However, the component bodies get expanded to cover the legs and whatever other details. e.g. the bodies are just bounding boxes (as intended by the file format). Since our moulds need to wrap tightly around components, this solution doesn't work. It's common for us to need to know where the component body ends so that we can place a mould section next to it, sitting above its legs. Or sometimes, we need to align a flex board with an FPC connector.
We are going to try importing the step file into Blender overnight (or maybe we have to convert it to a mesh file first), decimate the file, and then try importing the result into SolidWorks. This method will reduce a lot of the detail, but shouldn't be as bad as the IDF files. I will post how this test goes once the mechanical engineers have done it.
The two different plugins that claim to do this aren't on the table at this time but I'm still open to hearings about other people's experiences.
Does anybody have any other ideas? How is this done for large motherboards and graphics cards? I know for a fact that there are larger and more dense boards than ours out there. And our computers aren't exactly low grade.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Kind regards,
Dan
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