Why?
Having an accurate representation of PCB's helps with integration as well wire management and board placement. Using boards directly instead of using placeholders also helps reduce errors during manual transfer into a SolidWorks file. When the electrical team generates PCB's, they generate a STEP file or parasolid file (.x_t) which can be found in their GitHub. In this form the files cannot be used in SolidWorks assembly so some work has to be done in order to use them. Doing a lazy conversion into a SolidWorks files creates an unnecessary number of separate scattered files and an unnecessary file size which can make working in assemblies an issue. These files give us a data overload, as mech members we do not care about the placement of every single resistor or capacitor on the board (except for rendering purposes but that is a different story for a different time).
Opening the raw file
- Open the STEP or parasolid in solidworks. This can take a while, this is normal (one step took me a whole 2 hours to open)...
- Save the file as a single part and break the link to the original file