STEP export peculiarities in KiCad 5

[maui]

@paulvdh

FreeCAD is getting usable, but it still has not reached version 1, and rightly so in my opinion as there are far too many loose ends that do not work properly yet.

3D modeling is a difficult path… for sure FC doesn’t have the most intuitive user’s interface, but I would like to add this opinion made from a professional 3D designer which do SolidWorks Certification Course…
Is it Worth Learning FreeCAD? Can It Be Used Commercially? |JOKO ENGINEERING|
from ClosedCaptions:

I think freecad for what it is and that is primarily three people in their spare time developing this with some enhancements from the community have done a superbly fantastic job in making a software that runs like industry software and i think is incredibly useful

I use it all the time i use it alongside solidworks and all a bunch of other cad modelers
I esteem freecad highly for making such a wonderful complex workflow available for free to anybody
I love freecad i hope you do too in fact i think you should too
…
…
this being an open source software i’m very new to it but i cannot believe how powerful and immense and just overall impressive

that this software is being provided absolutely free it blows my mind and i i cannot thank the developers enough for making such a wonderful
useful relevant amazing software absolutely free it is a it is a treasure to use and as evidenced version 018 is even better than 017

truly incredible so again my my congratulations and admiration to those who’ve made such a great software

Joko EngineeringHelp channel: videos

Is it Worth Learning FreeCAD? Can It Be Used Commercially? |JOKO ENGINEERING|

[eelik]

@jwr

I very much disagree. The scaling feature was a fantastic way to quickly get a “bounding box”-style 3D model, which works well enough for mechanical design and is actually close to 100% accurate for things like atypical QFNs/DFNs or shielded inductors. It’s a lifesaver for those of us who do many things and can’t spend too much time on any single one. Also, if scaling is “officially” deprecated, then scaling options should be removed from the dialog. As it is now, they are there, they work within KiCad, show up scaled in 3D Viewer, but are not scaled for STEP export, which is inconsistent and probably not what was intended, whatever the decision on scaling.

There’s a discussion going on in the developers’ mailing list. It gives more opinions and technical background information: https://www.mail-archive.com/kicad-developers@lists.launchpad.net/msg38984.html

[jwr]

@eelik Thanks for the pointer — that discussion is interesting, and I’m really happy about the proposed idea of implementing a simple shape generator within KiCad, which would obviate my need for scaling unit boxes.

There remains the problem of missing STEP models in export (which are visible in 3D Viewer), which I guess will remain unsolved for now. I am working around this by adding the models manually in my MCAD later on.

I also wrote a response to @halachal’s comment, but decided to remove it as I think this direction of discussion is entirely unconstructive.