People keep asking about this... at the moment DXF is the only useful way to export a board to a 3D mcad (then you estrude it 1,6mm, usually, but you don't have component boundaries and stuff).
IDF3 *is* plausible to make, but does actually someone want it? In SolidWorks AFAIK you have to buy a special purpose module to import it (strange thing: while IDF3 is designed to go both ways, it seems that only the ECAD->MCAD route is used). IDF4 exists but AFAIK nobody uses it (like IPC356B!) General consensus is that STEP is the desiderable format (too bad IGES went out of popularity... it was freely documented and it's the precursor of STEP). However it's huge, no, bigger than huge, it's ISO-committee-designed. I have found this old message around, for more information: https://www.email-lists.org/pipermail/freearchitecture/2006-May/000079.html The only STEP toolkit available for open source is the one in OpenCASCADE. The zipped tar is more than 110MB (it's a whole geometry engine for cad...), I feel it's a little big as a dependency :D It seems that freecad uses it. I tried to look inside a STEP file. It's quite readable actually, *if* you have the schema to cross reference with. Too bad you have to pay, a lot, for that. And extremely verbose; it's actually a dump of a graph database (a good idea for a cad format IMHO). Too bad that for describing a parallelepiped geometry the ST-Developer kit (commercial) uses no less than 215 object (*two hundred fifteen* objects). And that using the AP-203 (the entry level schema). I reordered and indented the thing, it's quite obvious what is going on. I'll try to add a hole in that box to see what infernal representation it spawns:D However it seems feasible to reverse engineer the format for generating at least something like the IDF3 representation: board shape and prisms for component shapes. Not exactly like having the 'perfect' model, but beats extruding the board profile from the dxf at least. Any ideas on this? IIRC there were some people interested in this kind of thing. -- Lorenzo Marcantonio Logos Srl _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
