Draftsight-2D-OpenSCAD-3D-Print

Linked from Design_Workflows

• Download Draftsight from Dassault Systèmes

Draftsight Fundamentals (first 11m is fluff)

How to use Draftsight

Draw your design in Draftsight.[edit]

How to use every feature of Draftsight is outside the scope of this document. However here are the basics

• draftsight uses "units" for the measurements. I find it best to use metric, but nothing needs to change for you to use imperial.
• be sure all shapes are closed.
• be sure there are no stray/duplicated lines. I find the best way to insure this is to one at a time select each line/item I want to include, then cut and past it to a clean space. Verify everything is correct, then delete everything that was leftover.
• Verify design is in to its proper location in reference to the origin. OpenSCAD will use the same origin to reference your designs location. I find it best to put the origin dead center, and do my positional changes in OpenSCAD.
• File -> Export -> Export Drawing.
• Select the Unit System used for the measurements in your design. (I use mm)
• Click "Browse" at the bottom and select R2000-2002 ASCII Drawing (*.dxf) as the "Save as type".
• then make sure you are in the correct folder and type a name for the file. (I will use filename.dxf in my example)

Download OpenSCAD from openscad.org

OpenSCAD Documentation

10 Things to be dangerous in OpenSCAD

Import into OpenSCAD[edit]

• This will import your DXF into OpenSCAD. Then you can treat it just like any other shape.

translate([0,0,0]) { dxf_linear_extrude(file="filename.dxf", height=20, center=true, $fn=360); }

• $fn=360 sets the number of faces. If you have any circles in your DXF, this will keep them from looking boxy.

• OpenSCAD is unitless, everything seems to come out in mm. To use Imperial:

translate([0,0,0]) scale([25.4,25.4,25.4]) { dxf_linear_extrude(file="filename.dxf", height=20, center=true, $fn=360); }

Once you are happy with your OpenSCAD design, just use the menu to compile and then export as STL.