Built out of frustration. By a mechanical designer.

I’m a mechanical design consultant and the person behind CircuitSweep, developed through Addmec AB.

Working with PCB STEP files from electrical CAD, I kept running into the same problem: a board that was only one part of the design could slow down the whole project.

The main assembly could take 15 minutes to open. Updating a drawing view could mean a coffee break. Much of that waiting seemed to come down to the sheer number of small bodies in the imported PCB model.

The cleanup worked. Until the next revision.

Manually selecting and suppressing thousands of tiny components could help, but it took time. And the PCB rarely stayed the same. A project might go through five or six board revisions, each bringing a fresh STEP file and the same cleanup all over again.

That repeated work was the reason I started CircuitSweep: I wanted a practical way to get PCB models into SolidWorks and work with the detail I actually needed.

From a recurring problem to a focused tool

CircuitSweep brings together faster PCB STEP imports and simplified configurations. Its development includes tests of import times and model performance, with the findings and measured results published here.