- [Instructor] One of the major benefits of SOLIDWORKS PCB
is the collaboration and integration
between the electrical design and the mechanical design.
So, in many cases you'll have your electrical designers
designing up the schematic here and the PCB board layout.
And then on the other side of things,
you'll have the mechanical designers
to generate any mechanical layouts,
or say to fit into a mechanical enclosure.
And usually there's a lot of back and forth
between the two different teams
to make sure everything fits nicely,
for example a PCB, a footboard,
fitting inside of an enclosure, let's say.
And SOLIDWORKS PCB collaborates these two teams
by making it really easy to push and pull board designs
from our electrical design software to our mechanical.
So, let's take a look at that process here.
So, so far we've created our electrical schematic here.
And then I could just open up my other document,
my PCB board layout here.
And here's the start of my board layout.
Of course right now it's completely empty,
and I haven't placed any components or given any sizes,
or anything like that.
You can see here just by the default,
I think we have about a 100 millimeter
by 100 millimeter board design here.
And again, completely empty.
Or about four inches by four inches.
So, I have a few options.
I can create the board shape and board size
on the electrical design side of things here,
or I can design it on the mechanical side.
So, either/or, and we can push back and forth.
So, you can start with one, you can start with the other,
and it's really easy just to push things
back and forth between our two teams.
So, in this case, let's take a look at
maybe just starting off from the electrical side of things.
So, I'm gonna start with this blank board.
And I'm gonna push this over to my mechanical team.
So, the first thing I'm gonna wanna do is make sure I have
this SOLIDWORKS PCB Collaboration panel open.
If it's not open, just jump into my View tab,
and we have SOLIDWORKS PCB Connector right here,
I can turn that on or off
to bring in my Collaboration tool here.
And so, this is a very useful tool.
As you can see here, very easy to use, just push or pull.
And we have a similar type of panel
on the mechanical end of things as well.
So, essentially what we're doing here
is just electrical team doing some design work,
pushing it over to the mechanical team,
they'll pull it back then push it back
to the electrical team, make their changes.
Sort of just pushing and pulling from our two teams.
It makes the collaboration
very very easy and integrated process.
So, what I might do here is make any design changes,
add components on the electrical side.
And once I'm happy with it,
I'm just gonna leave it blank here,
I'm gonna say push this over to my mechanical team.
And click Push here.
And it gives me a nice prompt
to just add some sort of memo if I'd like
that will push over to my mechanical team.
I'm just gonna say something like this.
This is my original blank board design from the ECAD team.
So, I started it here
and I'm gonna push it over to my mechanical team.
And then I'll just click Post here.
And so, what this is doing now
is just gonna generate a 3D, more mechanical, model
from all the information here in SOLIDWORKS PCB.
Fairly simple in this case,
just a blank board with some dimensions.
But as we'll see once we add components,
change sizes, everything like that,
those 3D components will come in as well.
So, now I've pushed this over to my mechanical team
and depending on your company, maybe you do
both the electrical work and the mechanical work,
or maybe you have a large team of both,
depending on the size of your company.
So, now our mechanical team might just
open this up in SOLIDWORKS.
So, I'll just quickly open up my SOLIDWORKS here,
take a look at that.
And what I'm gonna see
on the SOLIDWORKS mechanical side of things
is a very similar idea.
The SOLIDWORKS PCB from the mechanical side of things
is really just an add-in here.
And I should see this tab right here,
this SOLIDWORKS PCB Add-in.
If I click on that, you'll see I have
a very similar type of format here.
So, essentially I can create a new board from scratch.
The mechanical team can set the dimensions here
and then push it over to the electrical team.
Or they can pull the board from the electrical designers.
So, you have the option vice versa
who wants to start your board creation.
And then once it's started, you can
very easily pass it back and forth
between each other with comments, as we'll see.
So, here I'm just gonna say Pull Board From a Specific PCB.
And here it gives me a list of all of my projects.
So, this is fairly important.
Of course you'll want to make sure
you're choosing the PCB from your correct project.
So, in this case I have
a few different test projects and so on.
Maybe when you're first starting
you'll just have one project, but as things move on,
you'll have quite a number of projects.
So, in this case, I think my electrical project
that I just pushed over was actually 03 LilyPad here.
So, I'm gonna make sure I grab 03 LilyPad
and I'll just say OK.
And now it's just going to generate that 3D model
from all the information on the electrical side of things.
And it's gonna ask me to save out as a Solid Assembly File.
So, I can give it whatever name I might want.
I might just throw in PCB somewhere here as well
so I know that this assembly is gonna be my PCB assembly.
And I'll just save it out wherever I might like.
And now we should be able to see,
automatically being generated,
and here's my very simple empty board.
But if I took all the dimensions, all the measurements,
I would see that it is that exact 100 millimeter
by 100 millimeter, or four inch by four inch,
that I saw on the electrical side of things as well.
And I can also see
the comments given by some of my team members.
In this case, it was myself, but I get a timestamp of that
and just the post or the memo given.
So, it's telling me that here's
the original blank board design
from the electrical design team.