I’m frequently using imported PCB models from 3rd parties for my designs. While I appreciate the level of detail they have in a lot of them, including the fact that dimensions for connectors and components are accurate, I’ve determined they’re helping to kill my projects.
The issue is even a small 40mm PCB can be loaded with 600-1,200 components. Multiply the number of PCB’s in the assembly and you can imagine this gets out of control pretty quickly.
I’ve tried opening in a new project and selecting all then union, iPad freezes. If it doesn’t freeze or downright crash it will usually take about 10min, then come back with an error that the boolean operation failed.
Does anyone have any advice on simplifying these, without converting it to a mesh file? I still need certain points to reference and align with other components. Is there a solid body export that will combine it into a single object that i’m just too dumb or tired to remember right now?
Temper your expectations? It’s nice that Shapr works on tablets and tablet PCs… but there are no “workstation class” tablets… Are we expecting too much from a tablet?
Maybe the answer is to put a representation of the PCB with the important bits connectors, mounting holes and such and ditch the capacitors, resistors etc. which add to the body count.
It’s open source and on their GitHub, I just linked to the actual file on my drive. I’ve been asked to work with this one, it freezes while “repairing geometries”.
Agreed, perhaps we are expecting too much from a tablet that was never intended for this level of performance. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned since becoming active here, is the community is really good at finding fixes and workarounds for some of the shortfalls of the program so was seeing if anyone had any ideas.
To your second point, spending time to re-create an object I can just download from the manufacturer and know it’s correct, is a little silly. I’ve found some simplified versions, but their accuracy has proven to be questionable at best. Even spending the time identifying and deleting all the unnecessary parts is not much of a compromise.
That’s kinda what @Oregonerd was getting at, but go into the items menu You’ll see what a mess it is to identify all those parts individually for deleting.
They’re not completely needed. But sometimes they are, since knowing the clearance on say the backside of the board for the components or the length the connector solder pins protrude.
I had trouble a while back with some imported Victron inverters. I went basically hid the shell and the parts that I wanted to keep and then box selected the rest and deleted it all.
Down to 32 items in a couple of mins. Went through what I presume might be needed, double clicking them. Put them all into a folder and dragged it out and then deleted the folder with the rest of the stuff in.
Yea, I’ve had boards from other companies that will be just the basic board and plug connectors and another body that symbolizes the components, more like a keep out area. Not visually pretty, but much simpler.
Straight from their website mate. If you open a product and click Downloads and Support, it’ll take you to a page where you can click Enclosure Dimensions and it’ll give you step files.
May I suggest you look into each of the 21 parts’ folder and remove the folder named LOGO present in half of them, which contains many unnecessary bodies located under the part?
I suggest also to export in binary _xt format (namely _xb), which is an option of the _xt export menu; as a result, the export file will be two times more compact than in standard ascii mode and will be processed faster during import.
THANK YOU! I’ll do this for other pcbs. Really wanted to avoid weeding through every single folder on every component to delete text. Just getting them to intersect with the board and union them was enough of a pain in the ass.
You’ll see what a mess it is to identify all those parts individually for deleting.
