Do you happen to know if these same rules hold true for models created in Solidworks?
I can’t seem to get any time at home to get back to work on this, but I can use my lunch break at work to whip this up real quick at the office.
You may find this useful
But I would suggest to give a try at StepUp that can import your footprint in the mechanical CAD, then your work will be easier 
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Solidworks is a tool. The choice of copyright of the output belongs to the user (or their employer)
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He was replying to Joan, about alignment I suppose
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Yes, I was asking about the orientation and scaling.
The linked post answered the orientation question.
If I’m reading right, SW models will have to be scaled where Inventor models do not?
Everyone says to model in MM, but I drew my footprint in mils, so I assume I can create my model in inches as well?
I will formally object to this post, on the grounds that it appears to offer legal interpretation by a company representative that is quite contrary to what their actual Terms and Conditions say.
On page https://app.ultralibrarian.com/Account/Register it says
"You are authorized to view pages of this Site for your own personal use, and that you may download and make modifications to download material. You may not sell, rent, lease, encumber, distribute, transfer or otherwise make available the downloaded materials or modifications to any person other than its authorized employees except as expressly provided for in this Agreement or with the advance written consent of EMA. "
There is no mention anywhere of distribution of derived works containing their copyrighted material.
In fact, not only are the T&Cs not compatible with Open Source, users are not permitted to publish the copyrighted material, regardless of license.
Unsuspecting readers could easily take the misleading advice and find themselves in breach of the T&Cs. I don’t think a post on a website by someone claiming to be from Ultra Librarian constitutes “advance written consent of EMA”.
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All the macros here to export from STEP to WRL for Kicad are designed to work with a STEP model in ‘mm’…
If you are on ‘dev’ release you can use STEP directly (loosing material properties and transparency), but I suppose the loading plugin won’t read units, and assign ‘mm’ as default (not sure about that, just supposing from what I remember)
PS using STEPUp for the conversion from STEP to WRL for kicad won’t force you to learn a different cad sw; it is just a Gui to align the model to kicad footprint and then export it to WRL with all featured material props… You can design your model in Inventor, export to STEP and align and convert it with StepUp
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One for @ChrisGammell, but I would think that these non-free 3D models can be used in a 3D rendering of an Opensource project and the rendering can be distrbuted, without tainting the project license.
The actual models cannot and at the moment KiCad does not cache 3D models in the project. in the way that it does for symbols and footprints. So the project would not automatically include the 3D model. This situation might change in the future.
That’s a good question. If the rendering was a PNG file, then there might still be a problem, depending on how far the copyright owner wishes to stake a claim. For example, if I take a photograph of a statue, the copyright owner of the statue could claim my photo breaches their copyright (this is not theoretical, it happens). A court may decide on various grounds whether an infringement has taken place, based upon things like the originality of the photo or “fair use”.
If the board was exported to STEP, then the STEP file is distributed with the project, I think the STEP file has a copy of the original models, so that would be a derived work. The copyright then depends on the owner of the included models.
Usually, if there is any doubt about original material from a copyright owner being included in a derived work, there is an explicit disclaimer. So in the case of compilers like gcc, or fonts, there are specific waivers to allow material to be included in a derived work. Ultra Librarian (EMA) make no such provisions in their formal Terms and Conditions, so the safe interpretation is that they may claim copyright on derived works.
Considering that the “free” data offered is not even very good, it just doesn’t seem worth the risk of tainting an Open Source project. Given the hazy legal grounds and dubious quality, I generally avoid the “free” sites as much as possible.
For hobbyists and SMEs who never intend to publish projects, I guess it is fine, but take note of clauses 3 & 4
You further agree to take all reasonable steps and to exercise due diligence to protect the Software or Content and the accompanying materials from unauthorized reproduction, publication or distribution.
EMA reserves the right to terminate your license and to seek any other legal remedies upon default by you of this Agreement.
If you are careless with their data, and someone gets hold of it, they can sue you for damages. This “free” stuff comes with a lot of strings attached!
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Can’t answer that - Solidworks is 10 years in the past for me…
I would try like Inventor though… z-axis is upwards and either mm or inch doesn’t really matter. The STEP file should carry the units that are being used for the CAD model(s) contained within it.
KiCAD should be able to show it correctly.
Just try with some test cube and see how you go
Awesome. Thank you again!
One for me? Why? I noted @bobc’s objection to UltraLibrarian, but other than splitting out the thread and discussing with/berating them about their incongruent licensing policy (a waste of time), I think we should stick to helping the original poster, which I’m glad we continued to do.
Keep things light, keep things helpful!
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I think his point is that you may consider removing the post to make sure it doesn’t cause confusion if someone finds it during a search.
I’d like to thank @bobc for his scrutiny and careful observation. He was correct in pointing out that our terms and conditions did not agree with my statements. We went back to the terms and conditions and revised it extensively to match our true intent, and I think you’ll find that there are now no issues with using Ultra Librarian parts in any design, open source or otherwise. Here is an excerpt:
“You may incorporate the Subscription Content that you are authorized to access into your products or designs which may be distributed without restriction, including for commercial, educational, and open-source purposes.”
You can read the full agreement here: https://app.ultralibrarian.com/Account/Register
In addition if you are interested in learning more about how to get parts from Ultra Librarian and load them into KiCad watch our KiCad tutorial on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97ptgMioZMo
We love to hear from our customers, so if you have other feedback, please let us know.
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I don’t think that really helps at all, it is quite vague from a legal point of view, and also seems to contradict other parts of the license. Unless “open-source purposes” includes relicensing Subscription Content as GPL for example, but I don’t think that is what you mean.
The license terms are now very confusing, they are mostly proprietary and only possibly allow open source use. Generally, it is recommended to avoid writing these sort of “DIY” Open Source licenses. There is a long list of suitable licenses at https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical
To be honest, I don’t think there is any sort of open source license that you will find suitable for your business model. The very ethos of Open Source is freedom of use, if you try to restrict that so that you are the exclusive supplier of the data then that immediately excludes Open Source use.
I think it would be better to drop the Open Source idea and concentrate on customers who are willing to pay for proprietary data.
I think if you read the new terms and conditions document, you will see that you can download schematic symbols, PCB footprints and 3D STEP models, put them in your designs, and distribute your designs all you want. That is certainly our intent.
To be clear, we are not trying to create an open source library. We are a business and we hope you’ll want lots of parts and pay for a subscription. But we also think 15 free parts per month is good for a lot of people, especially if you only get the parts you can’t find elsewhere. It was in that spirit that we created our initial post to this thread.
I don’t want to hijack this thread any more than I already have, so if anyone has more specific questions, please e-mail us at info@ultralibrarian.com, and we can take it off-line.