I designed my board in KiCad and sent it off to OSHPark and my purple boards just arrived. I will donate when I start selling product hopefully before Christmas. Now, I need to make a fixture to support the board and mount it to other equipment. I need to get this board drawing to dxf format. I need to put it along with other components in my CAD package. How do I get it to dxf?
Click on “Plot” and change the format to DXF.
Thank you very much. I was looking in print instead of plot.
Is *.DXF one of the available “Plot” formats? I thought it was under “File” > “Export”. This may be a case where the Nightly and Release versions differ.
Regardless, the *.DXF files produced by KiCAD used to be rather low quality. (Perhaps this has changed in recent Nightly builds.) Forum member @maui has written a Python script that works much better. See the last half of my post at Exporting DXF files .
Dale
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Well, I have a very old nightly, and the conversion to DXF is done under plot. I don’t know why, but I went looking for it under “Export” also at first. Then, I remembered that is not where I thought it was the last time I went looking for it.
Having it under “Plot” is a little quirky.
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Yeah, in my mind program outputs intended for human consumption are produced by “Print” or “Plot” commands, while files intended for other programs or computers are created in “Export” routines. But that is a subtle distinction in English, and KiCAD is being created in a consortium of people with several non-English first-languages.
To be honest, I went by memory rather than actually looking. (My KiCAD work is on a different computer than the one I used to answer that post.) It’s possible that “Export” is how you produce *.DXF on some other CAD/CAE tool that I use. Or perhaps, as I suggested, there is a difference between Release and Nightly builds.
Have you created *.DXF files from KiCAD? When I first did that, about a year ago, I remember that the result was disappointing. That’s when I discovered the Python script that produced what I wanted, and I’ve used the script ever since.
Dale
I would suggest you have a look at kicad stepup.
That way you get the board as step (including the components on it) and can use that to design your housing.
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I can’t remember much of the export side, maybe the nightlies once had “Export DXF”, but if it had it would only have brought up the “Plot” dialog.
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You are correct - none of my KiCAD installations can create a *.DXF using “Export”. You must use “Plot” and select the file format. I must have been thinking of some other CAD/CAE tool.
Dale