yang686526

inserting .dwg or .dxf into a drawing
i'm working with exported files (.dxf or .dwg) from orcad and the files are huge when inserted into a sw drawing. is the anyway to compress the file size? i tried making a block out of the file, but still doesn't help. i have the bottom view of an electrical board inserted into a drawing and it's 22.5 mb. can't imangine what the file will be when i insert the top view.
is there an export option in orcad or sw that needs to be set?
thanks for you help
colin fitzpatrick (aka macduff)
mechanical designer
solidworks 2008 sp 3.1
dell 490 xp pro sp 2
xeon cpu 3.00 ghz 3.00 gb of ram
nvida quadro fx 3450 512 mb
i'm just a little verklempt. talk amongst yourselves. i'll give you a topic. pink floyd, was neither pink nor floyd. discuss!--"coffee talk" mike myers snl

find a job or post a job opening
have you tried running ecosqueeze or unfrag on the sw file?
have you tried cleaning up the dwg or dxf in acad or dwgeditor?

i thought there was a problem with the ecosqueeze software?
colin fitzpatrick (aka macduff)
mechanical designer
solidworks 2008 sp 3.1
dell 490 xp pro sp 2
xeon cpu 3.00 ghz 3.00 gb of ram
nvida quadro fx 3450 512 mb
i'm just a little verklempt. talk amongst yourselves. i'll give you a topic. pink floyd, was neither pink nor floyd. discuss!--"coffee talk" mike myers snl

ecosqueeze isn't "official", so isn't supported if it trashes a file. however, if you save copies of your squeezable files in their own directory you could try it out on copies of the files and have no risk (except possible problems in the future with those files--but that might be a long shot).

jeff mowry
our guys here use pcbexpress for electronic layout, but we document the pcbs and pcas in sw. i have found that inserting pdfs works very well. it is then a simple thing to edit the original pcbexpress files and reinsert the pdfs. it might seem like "double the effort" but it really isn't.
"art without engineering is dreaming; engineering without art is calculating."
check your geometry. sometimes the .dxf from orcad will have overlapping or multiple lines stacked that need to be cleaned up...reducing the size.
when complete, run ecosqueeze.
chris
solidworks/pdmworks 08 3.1
autocad 06/08
like this chris (see attached)? i just zoomed in on the board area and found this crap. when i made a block in autocad, it read there was 45,686 elements. i think this is where my problem is at, no?
lol!

colin fitzpatrick (aka macduff)
mechanical designer
solidworks 2008 sp 3.1
dell 490 xp pro sp 2
xeon cpu 3.00 ghz 3.00 gb of ram
nvida quadro fx 3450 512 mb
i'm just a little verklempt. talk amongst yourselves. i'll give you a topic. pink floyd, was neither pink nor floyd. discuss!--"coffee talk" mike myers snl

that's frustrating. i used to have to deal with drawings like that all the time. had to spend a lot of time deleting stuff like that so i could get drawings that actually responded.

jeff mowry
colin,
would the 2d-3d conversion tools in swx help? isn't there one for "cleaning up" things like overlapping entities? i don't use it because i've found it easier to just remodel from scratch anything that we have in acad, but in your case this could be a big help if it works.
- - -updraft
colin,
yes. my suggestion is to draw the pcb per the board drawing dim's. someone has the dim's.
for all of the components, use simple outlines and delete the extra lines shown in your attachment.
or, if you are using circuitworks, it will do most of the work for you.
chris
solidworks/pdmworks 08 3.1
autocad 06/08
thanks for the feedback guys.
what we normally do here is create a board and it's components in an assembly (very generic) insert the assembly into a drawing to have associativity. then the pcb designers export the top and bottom views to .dxf or .dwg so we can overlay it onto the sw drawing views. we do this to get the silk-screening of the designators and the smaller detail components not modeled in sw. plus it's kind of a double check to see if they moved components on us. you know how sneaky they can be. lol!

colin fitzpatrick (aka macduff)
mechanical designer
solidworks 2008 sp 3.1
dell 490 xp pro sp 2
xeon cpu 3.00 ghz 3.00 gb of ram
nvida quadro fx 3450 512 mb
i'm just a little verklempt. talk amongst yourselves. i'll give you a topic. pink floyd, was neither pink nor floyd. discuss!--"coffee talk" mike myers snl