I noticed that the 3D viewer in the nightly 5.99 version models the inner layers of the pcb. That is, you can see the inner copper layers when viewing the pcb from the edge as the pcb material is now rendered with some transparency. There is also quite a bit of detail regarding the surface layers (paste, silk, mask, etc).
Is it possible to export this additional detail with the STEP file? The standard STEP export provides a compound solid model for the PCB and it doesn’t appear possible to drill down into the model and view the details. It would be handy to be able to view the copper and materials within the pcb stack up in the STEP file.
I have been using realthunder’s fork for a while and had a look a while ago a the fcad_pcb tools. Kicad 5.99 now has the copper thickness info in the stackup as well as the dielectric materials and thickness. I wonder if realthunder is planning to extract that info from the stackup? I opened an issue on his GitHub page about this.
I wouldn’t expect a quick turn on this simply because 5.99 file formats and API aren’t necessarily written in stone yet. They should be, but there may be some bug fix that changes the file formats and API in small ways. As such, many plugin authors have chosen to not update their plugins until 6.x comes out so they have more confidence that they aren’t targeting a moving target.
If he does update for a 5.99 feature, great! Just don’t expect all plugin authors to update for 5.99.
(I’m just trying to help manage expectations here. I have no communication with realthunder, so I don’t know his attitude and/or workload.)
The fcad_pcb tools is not a Kicad plugin, it is a FreeCAD plugin. I believe it uses some Kicad libraries to parse the Kicad pcb file. The way the plugin currently works requires the user to specify the board thickness and copper thickness on the command line. This is what I think could be taken from the pcb stackup automatically. Moreover, there is additional dielectric materials and thickness information in the stackup now that would be useful for the FreeCAD model. It appears that realthunder already supports 5.99 features.
That is correct. I wasn’t clear that when I used the word plugin, I was being generic encompassing KiCad plugins, stand-alone program plugins, and plugins for other software that need to know how to parse KiCad data (either directly or by loading the KiCad python library). All of which use assets controlled by the KiCad team, and 5.99 is still officially untested nightly development builds. (Unofficially it seems to be reported as stable…)
That said, asking RealThunder to tackle this now isn’t a bad thing. He may handle it now, or he may just back-burner it until 6.x is officially released either as stable or as release candidate(s).
Indeed … I am quite impressed with the stability. I tinkered with it months ago but didn’t do anything serious with it. I’ve been working with it for a couple weeks now more seriously and it is quite good. I think I’ve only had one crash and that only occurred when I closed the app so it didn’t matter much.