“To design the future effectively, you must first let go of your past.” – Charles Givens. How true, but where do we begin on our quest to design the next generation of products and solutions that we all depend upon? How do you consider the mechanical and the electronic parts of your designs when you tackle a new project? Do you think of the electronics at the very get go? Do you know nearly all products contain some amount of circuitry? Even with this staggering amount of cables, transistors, chips and circuit boards, many CAD designs do not incorporate this information into the digital definition of their model. It may be the fault of the CAD developers not integrating the electrical/electronic side of things with the mechanical side, as they are typically produced by completely different companies.
I think we are getting closer though… If you own SolidWorks Premium, you have the CircuitWorks add-in. This is a product that has been around the SolidWorks community for quite some time developed by a group of Brits called “Zeal Solutions” as a gold partner solution. Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp purchased this company a couple years ago now and they have given the product some great new features on top of what has already been in place for years.
The CircuitWorks user interface has been enhanced to better integrate with SolidWorks. For example, the CircuitWorks feature tree is now available in SolidWorks. Also, CircuitWorks can now update an assembly that is open in SolidWorks when you make minor changes in CircuitWorks such as adding, deleting, or moving components. Previously, CircuitWorks rebuilt the entire assembly for any change. A huge new improvement for companies that modeled their PCB in SolidWorks without the aid of CircuitWorks is the ability to import SolidWorks assemblies that represented a PCB and add it to the CircuitWorks database, so that there more design reuse and less overhead. Finally, the CircuitWorks reader for Mentor Graphics® PADS ASCII (.asc) now imports files faster and supports plated holes.
One more thing that I would like to add is the fact the you can use CircuitWorks as a viewing application. Simply create a shortcut to C:\Program Files\SolidWorks Corp\SolidWorks\CircuitWorksFull\circuitworks.exe and place it on your desktop or wherever you please. This will open the CircuitWorks Viewer, where you can open PADS and IDF format files without converting them to SolidWorks documents. You can even compare 2 PCB designs here and it will highlight the differences.
Please contact us here at CAPINC if you have more questions on CircuitWorks. We will be featuring this product in an upcoming webcast on Thursday March 11, 2010 at 3pm. Keep an eye out for it at the CAPINC seminar page. I will post a tweet about it as soon as we have a signup link ready to go.
There is a tremendous amount of productivity to be gained when implementing the use of keyboard shortcuts in SolidWorks. The ones I use most commonly are below:
A customer asked be today if one can add more holes to the SolidWorks Hole Wizard database. My first answer to him was yes, it can. Remembering how to accomplish this in the past, by going into the SolidWorks Tools… Options one could go to the Hole Wizard / Toolbox folder and directly edit the database. I found myself struggling with how to actually edit the database tables made available to the user though a slick interface designed by SolidWorks. Well, as it turns out, fir first thing you need to do is to make a copy of the International Standard that most closely matches the items that you most commonly use. I selected the ANSI Inch standard. Then I looked around for the “Copy Standard” button, which I could not seem to find. After a few minutes of hunting around, I found it; it was a pair of double folders, about 10 microns square in size. So rather than ramble further, I made a video for you to enjoy so you could see how I added a custom 1 inch 20 pitch thread hole to the database, which is dot available in our standard ANSI Inch database. Follow this link to enjoy the video: 
SustainabilityXpress is part of SolidWorks 2010 and available for SolidWorks 2009 on SolidWorks Labs. It is a compelling illustration of SolidWorks Corporation’s revolutionary effort to promote eco-friendly design. If you’re a skeptic of the green design movement, you might still find the software useful for its ability to suggest similar materials.
SolidWorks Sustainability is around the corner. This will make it easy for engineers to make decisions about product process, material selection and environmental impact. To see Rick Chin of SolidWorks discuss and demonstrate a preview version of this, go to 
