I’m designing a serial TTL HMI (16 chars x 2 rows plus 4 pushbuttons) based in LCD-1602A parallel display, PIC16F628A plus a few components.
Using FreeCAD, I’ve designed the 3D shape of LCD-1602A in .fcstd format (other components have its 3dshapes in kicadpackages-3d repository).
I’m trying to export this .fcstd to scaled .wrl and .step formats, previously making an union operation on relevant objects, using KiCad STEPUP.
.step export works OK, despite it doesn’t preserve View propierties (colour, transparency, etc.).
But .wrl export goes wrong: generated union object has its own colour, superimposed to components (underlaying objects) colours. Changing colour or transparency (to 100%) in union object doesn’t help: .wrl always shows union colour at 0% transparency in various surfaces, making it unnusable in PCBnew 3D viewer.
Attached LCD-1602A.fcstd showing this issue.
Union object is PCB.fd and the generated PCB_sp object (the object name comes from the first object selected for union, I haven’t edited it unlike the other objects in .fcstd)
You can try to export to scaled .wrl using KiCad STEPUP, to see this issue.
Any tought on this?
Your replies are welcome.
DanielH
Thanks you very much, maui!
I am very grateful for your effort and help to solve my problem.
Please, could you explain how you did the simplification of the original .fcstd file?
The Tree View of the simplified model only shows generic objects (xxx_sp), without information (Data Propierty) on which feature or method was used to build them.
The only data available about each object is its placement.
Knowing about your simplification labour will be useful in my future design works…
About cyclic dependency: I will review my original design again, to try to find the origin of the problem (I had fought with it more than two days).
I have used FreeCAD about two years ago, for very simple mechanical designs. Now, as a KiCAD user, I found it again…
New 0.17 version has so much improvements, and new features (notably for me, Body and Part “containers” in PartDesign WB).
I must learn to use these (and many other) new features and methods!
BTW:
I think your KC STEPUP is a perfect “matchmaker” between two excelent free and open softwares: KiCAD and FreeCAD (I use both in Arch Linux OS).
Congratulations!!!
I just made a copy-union (with the ksu button) of each single Body or Part you have in your file and then I union-ed all of them.
FC 0.17 indeed have a lot of improvements in Part Design and also in the Sketcher!
Still there are some workaround to manage Body and Part new containers, because not all the FC WBs are fully compliant with them.
Those are great software for ECAD MCAD collaboration!
