3D Body Collision Detection

[khollandSR]

I just had an issue with a board edge connector that I didn’t catch. The maximum PCB thickness I had spec’d was too thick and I didn’t catch it visually with the 3D viewer because the way it rendered looked fine.

When in Altium they have as part of the DRC check 3D body collision, that would have flagged this for me. Any way to do this in Kicad, or does anyone have a good workflow to implement 3D Body collision detection using external tools like FreeCad?

[BlackCoffee]

FreeCAD has a few Assembly Workbenches, I don’t use them (except for the Animated Assembly Workbench) but I did try some out a few years ago and at least one of them had/has Collision detection.

If you have a Kicad PCB, you can load it (and the 3D models) using the StepUp Workbench in FreeCAD and get what you need afterwards by using the Assembly Workbench (the one with the collision tool…)

ADDED: Perhaps this is all you need… in FreeCAD, after loading the PCB and Parts, and setting the View orientation as needed, you can simply use the Clipping-Plane tool (no Assembly workbench needed).

Set the desired View and Clipping distance…
Example below shows a blank PCB, no parts and some receiving gizmo to represent the Edge-Card receiving connector… From that, you can visual see

(I see Maui has just posted re StepUp…)

[maui]

in FreeCAD kicadStepUp has a collision tool

[khollandSR]

Thanks, Kicad StepUp interference check works well when I just select the connector and the PCB, but it crashes if I try to run it on all the parts. I’ll play around with it some more, but this is a step in the right direction.