4 Reasons Why The SolidWorks PCB Connector will Revolutionize your ECAD/MCAD Collaboration

With today’s booming IOT (Internet of Things) and consumer electronics industry, multidisciplinary teams of engineers often have to work together to develop products. Speaking purely from a hardware perspective, mechanical designers and electrical designers use MCAD and ECAD software to develop the physical constraints of the project, and they often rely on each other. As an example of this collaboration, mechanical designers will often ask the electrical designers of the board shape they desire, or perhaps the electrical designers will require the hole locations from their mechanical counterparts. In this article we discuss how the SolidWorks PCB Connector can revolutionize the collaboration between ECAD PCB tools (SolidWorks PCB and Altium) and SolidWorks.

Complete CAD Freedom

It’s quite apparent that PCB CAD software are usually programmed primarily with PCB and electrical design freedom in mind. CAD software such as Altium and SolidWorks PCB are excellent in their realm of PCB design, but when it comes to specifying mechanical constraints, using these software’s alone can be a daunting task. This is where the SolidWorks PCB Connector comes into play; it allows Altium or SolidWorks PCB users to collaborate with mechanical designers through SolidWorks, and allows for the passing of CAD data between these two environments.

Specifying board shapes for example, especially complex shapes with multiple curves or hard to measure entities, can take a lot of time and effort in PCB software, but with the collaboration tool, SolidWorks is able to easily achieve this task in no time. Furthermore, in cases where the PCB is housed such as the case with consumer electronics, it can be quite simple for the mechanical designer to specify the board shape based on the model of the enclosure.

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Can you Benefit from Using Classes?

In Altium Designer, we can assign specific class types to our nets or components in our project. Classes are a logical collection of a design object such as nets, components or polygons. This is typically done to allow easy creation of a targeted design rule.

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SOLIDWORKS PCB – Shortcuts you NEED to know

Sometimes you come across tools that unfortunately skipped out on an intuitive User Interface or easy to use commands, which could have been easily implemented to exponentially increase productivity. SOLIDWORKS PCB is not one of those tools.

On top of it’s Unified Platform, easy to use UI and automated output generation, SOLIDWORKS PCB also includes a clean shortcut panel that includes great shortcuts available across the platform. While this list is extensive, there are a few you should be leveraging that are not listed.

Place Via while routing:

While routing, press the “+” or “-” key to drop a via. The via is now on your cursor, ready to be placed on the next layer to continue routing. If you do not have a numeric pad, use the “2” key, followed by the “L” key to toggle the next layer.

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5 Steps to Activate your License of MySolidWorks Professional

Now that you have a serial key for MySolidWorks Professional, you may be asking yourself ‘how do I activate this’? Unlike other SOLIDWORKS serial keys, this doesn’t run on the installation manager and it is a webpage – not software. With that said, follow the five steps below so that you can quickly get access to the additional features that MySolidWorks Professional offers:

• Training
• Prep courses for SOLIDWORKS certification exams
• Reseller uploaded content
• Access to the SPR database

Step By Step Instructions

Visit the SOLIDWORKS Customer Portal and either login, or create an account using your company information (email, etc.). After you create your account and login, look for the ‘Register My Products’ link.

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Contact Us:
CAD MicroSolutions
65 International Blvd, Suite 103,
Toronto, Ontario M9W 6L9
Email: info@cadmicro.com