I’m aware of the Communicator add on but not willing to pay for it as I’ve been perfectly fine with producing drawings without it for years. All my drawing are 3D and exclusively for my welding and other projects so I’ve never used a drawing file except as a storage mechanism for future reference. 3D printing is the first time I’ve contemplated passing a drawing to another app for further processing.
I just checked and BricsCAD won’t output a step file. It’s pretty much various versions of dwg and dxf trying to mimic AutoCAD for the various flavors it put out over the years.
I’ll have to wait to see if Shape will provide a solution as soon as my new video board arrives.
yeah that is where they get ya! Fusion360 used to be totally free for a hobbyist and still is but they make you jump thru hoops to get it working. BricsSYS will make the $$ of the export addon!
Not sure if you are concerned about IP or not but there are free converters available online. I’ve used them once or twice in a pinch but never depended on them for permanent solutions.
I paid around $1500 - $1700 (don’t remember exactly) for my BricsCAD Platinum license in 2019 and I’m not giving them another nickel. When I was looking for a Linux 3D CAD package, I found nothing I liked but BricsCAD, so I bought it. Shortly thereafter they went to a subscription model while I have a perpetual license.
Thanks for the link to a conversion site. I’m a retired professional software developer, so I don’t condone IP theft, but I see nothing wrong with using a site that offers a conversion service.
The way things are going, soon you won’t be able to lend a friend a book to read without violating some lawyers 19 pages of prohibitions intended to make what you bought subject to their control. I’m not having it.
Turning 60 next yr. I don’t want to have to learn yet another CAD package! Install what ever I can every other year it seems in Linux Mint just to see what they look like but never mess with them since I keep a dual boot system setup specifically for M$ CAD apps. Haven’t been successful (that depends on how that is defined) at getting F360 to run in LM.
Was trained on SW 2000 then a yr or two later ended up with Inventor. That’s always covered by the employer eventually at home. There were times though I didn’t have anything on the MS partition so eventually picked up F360 and ran with that for yrs at home. One point I paid the $400’ish for a year of use of it. When they eventually went to a 10 active file limit situation within F360 I ended up once again with an employer-approved install of Inventor so am covered for now. Got tired of converting all files between F360 and .ipt/.iam and vs versa (a few times - based off of what I had available to install) so only do so now when needed.
I mention the IP thing because I have certain things I’m concerned about and am not printing them at the moment. Creality still has a use it seems!
I have been running on Linux Mint for the last month and its been a decent experience. I had to change to the official Nvidia drivers to fix a startup crash. I have been running the 1.8.X beta and it seems to have fixed a few nagging glitches.
My mistake. Shape will output .stl files. For some reason, I was looking for .stp file type. I have no idea where I got that from.
I just checked and my licensed BricsCAD will output .stl files also. It has it labeled as a lithography type. I just tried exporting a drawing I already had of a 20’ shipping container and it did produce a .stl file.
I was looking for the wrong file type the whole time.
