X3D assemblies from any CAD
Converting mechanical assemblies to X3D models from STEP (ISO 10303) files
Like all manufacturing companies we use mechanical CAD program to design our products. We would love to use Free Software programs for that, but so far even FreeCAD has a warning on their download page “FreeCAD is under heavy development and might not be ready for production use”. We have to use proprietary tools, our choice was the program that natively runs on GNU/Linux we use on our computers. This program generates STEP files that we can send to virtually any machine shop (locally or overseas) and expect to receive the manufactured parts that match our design. For the last 6 years we kept the CAD models for all the camera parts on Elphel Wiki hoping they might be needed not only by the machine shops we order parts from, but also by our users to incorporate (or modify) our products in their systems.
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