Hey there,

I am creating a rather big assembly in Solidworks 2014 with dozens of external and virtual parts. The whole thing is built around a PCB that is still under developement, no major design changes -mind you- but every once in a while an LED or a button might have to be moved. Our engineer in charge of the PCB uses Altium and we use STEP as an intermediate format between Altium and SW. For the assembly I use a bunch of features on a pretty large number of parts that are derived from the original PCB (holes for the LED-s, cutouts, etc) but I also need to periodically update my model to incorporate changes made by our electrical engineer. And this is where this whole thing gets interesting: whenever I try to replace the board in the assembly I lose a WHOLE lot of model references and mates and fixing those would be such a headache I might as well redo the whole assembly.

Is there a way I can replace the board without losing the work I've done up until that point?

cheers,

David