Friday, January 29, 2016

MCAD Co-Designer Solidworks Update (29 January 2016)

update to the Co-Designer technology, that targets critical bug fixes.

Key change of this release is proper handling of the MCAD-ECAD origins. From now MCAD origin is explicit entity on ECAD side, that is being set automatically and is being moved with the board [shape]. That allows to use standard origin approach on mechanical side, and have board in working area on pcb side.

Important
Due to fixes to the of the storage engine on the server and origin change, this update MUST be applied for both sides, as for extension on Altium Designer side (to 1.0.1.16) as for SolidWorks plugin (to 1.0.1.20).
Those, who had access to intermediate version of AD extension (version 1.0.1.8) might face error "Unable to create sketch" on SW side. In that case you need to cleanup folder with cache of the models on SW side and perform pull operation once more.

Update to Altium Designer extension could be received traditionally, via Extension&Updates page. Solidworks plugin need to installed manually using provided installer (yes, mechanical engineers need to install that). See download section of the site
http://www.altium.com/products/downloads

Release Notes
#6548    3D models generated by CoDesigner extensions are now properly stored on the server (requires AD and SW plugins to be updated in sync)
#6937    Component's placed from the Vault are now properly supported
#8289    SolidWorks Collaboration plug-in no longer pushes an error when footprint name contains double quotation characters.
#8552    Resolved ambiguity with mechanical and electrical origins. On Altium Designer side explicit mechanical origin was introduced, which is automatically is instantiated on a first sync to the left bottom corner of the boards bounding box.
#8716    Network related time-out no longer happens while pushing huge models to the server
#9178    Fixed error "Value cannot be null. Parameter name: source" while pulling design to SolidWorks
#9391    Error "Unable to create sketch" are not longer appears. Requires synchronous update of AD and SW plugins.
#9395    Resolved improper import of board geometry defined with arcs to SolidWorks
Last edit: Nikolay Ponomarenko, 4 hours ago