STEP file generator for Allegro PCB Assembly Variants

Skill script for Allegro PCB Designer to generate a JSON file containing the board contour and the STEP file mapping for each symbol, as well as the actual STEP file generation by a c++ console application using opencascade .

Prerequisites

To make the skill script available for use, you need to copy the makeVariant3dIntermediates.il file to your local skill directory ( usually your installation path + \share\pcb\etc ) or the skill directory in the $CDS_SITE path. Append it to the allegro.ilinit file ( add load( "path/makeVariant3dIntermediates.il" ) ) or load it manually via the skill load command ( type set telskill into the command line and then type load("makeVariant3dIntermediates.il" ).

To run the console application, you must extract the contents dlls.zip into the same directory where the StepBuilder.exe is located.

├── bin
│ ├── StepBuilder.exe 
│ │── TKernel.dll
│ │── ...
│ │── TKXSBase.dll

Usage

Once the script is loaded successfully, you can start exporting the json file by typing skill makeVariant3dIntermediates( path ) + enter in the command line. A directory named like the passed argument is created in your project folder containing the .json files. An optional argument containing the pcb color as a list can be passed to the function. For example, list( 0.0 0.4 0.0 ).

As a second step, the created .json file(s) need to be passed to the console application. The application accepts 3 mandatory arguments.

1. the path to the directory all STEP files of your footprints are stored
2. the filename or full path to the .json file
3. the path to the directory the output file should be stored (the filename is defined by the name field in the .json file)

Example

StepBuilder.exe "path\to\your\step\files" "path\to\yourDesign.json" "path\to\output\file\directory"

The application can be launched directly from Allegro using.

shell( "StepBuilder.exe \"path\to\your\step\files" \"path\to\yourDesign.json\" \"path\to\output\file\directory"" ).

Don't forget to escape all backslashes.