Import Parasolid assembly into a Part

[Mats_Bj]

1. Describe your environment: What is your industry? What is your role in your organization? Describe your stakeholders.
Our company is making security equipment, mostly surveillance cameras. They are a mix of plastic and metal pieces with integrated electronics, optics etc. As it's delivered globally, it needs to fulfil multiple environmental conditions, country specific legislation, recyclable materials and more.

I'm the CAD administrator, responsible for upgrades, configurations, users support etc. for our ~180 users of Creo Parametric.

2. What version of Creo Parametric are you currently running?
We're using 7.0.2.0. We intended to upgrade to 7.0.7.0 as we were expecting a bug to be solved. As this wasn't the case; you will never solve it (according to SPR 12676058), I'm creating this idea for improvement instead.

3. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video.
We have found that the integrated Shrinkwrap functionality is sometimes unreliable and slow. We have replaced that (back in Creo 5) with our own solution to use the Parasolid format instead. In a Mapkey we export the assembly of and PCB, then creates an empty part and imports that Parasolid file. The geometry usually gets much more accurate (more components that show correct geometry) and is about 3-4 times faster.

Up to Creo 5 we used relative accuracy (0.0012) for which the above method worked fine. We upgrade to Creo 7 in February 2021 and then we wanted to adopt to your new recommendation using absolute accuracy. We updated our start templates, but we found an issue when importing Parasolid into a part when the accuracy is set to absolute.

So, our wish is to be able to import a Parasolid assembly file into an CAD part with absolute accuracy, regardless of what type of accuracy the import file has.

The workaround that we use (which is integrated in our Mapkey) is to first set the accuracy to Relative, do the import, then set it back to Absolute accuracy.

We had hope that this wouldn't be required in the new release of Creo. Another case is when we get a file from a supplier (usually other types then PCBs) which can be in Parasolid or Step format. If it's the Parasolid format, we need to make the workaround mentioned above.

4. What is the use case for your organization?
As we have integrated PCBs, there are a lot of iterations between ecad and mcad to find the final solution. We're using IDF files for this work, but in the end we shrinkwraps the PCB to avoid have thousands of components on the PCB when we're mostly interested in the interface, but still want to have a fairly thorough geometrical representation of it. We're using flow analysis too for instance to check cooling.

5. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization?
Avoid working with workarounds and potential user problems.

config.pro

[olivierlp]

Hello, 

Thank you for your idea and the comprehensive information you provided.

[S_Edgenear]

We deal with probably a similar problem, but we can solve it if before importing the parasolid file, we change the units to meters, then do the import, and revert back the units to mm. Parasolid seems to always export in meters as unit (I don't know if also allows units in inches, but in the metric system, I never saw a XT file with the units in milimeters insetead of meters. So, with the accuracy set for 0.01 (that we use for milimeters in otr templates), the imported parasolid in a part or an assembly, the accuracey then gets multiplied by 1000 leading to very inaccurate geometry. We tried several methods when reading an assembly or a part parasolid file, using internal (template) or external (file) accuracy, using relative or absolute accuracy, and the one that gave us the best imported geometry was using this method: create 2 templates, one for *ASM and one for *.PRT with units in meters, set a reasonable accuracy value in meters, and when importing an into an assembly or into a part, specify in the import options to use the meter template. This give us consistent results, but it would be better if Creo by default used this kind of procedure, or gave us accurate results when the XT files are in meters and we use milimeter templates.