Tonight I opened the #Pinephone back cover CAD file in #FreeCAD to check it out, as I want to design a case with a quick access battery door. Unfortunately I found with a geometry check that the STEP file imports with a sh*t load of geometry errors, it's considered an invalid solid. That makes editing it problematic.

I'll have to see if the commercial CAD software I use at work can repair it. Actually I've had the work PC home since March. But booting it on a weekend? Bleh. (It's running Windows 😉)

@normand I'm not too familiar with this use case, but I wonder if it has to do with round off errors on coordinates. I've made simple programs to clean up these values and everything worked afterwards.

@daniel
It's possible. Conversion from a geometric kernel to another (Pro Engineer's Granite to STEP to Open Cascade in this case) is often problematic with non-prismatic shapes. The case's rounded edges are part cylindrical, part B-spline surfaces.

Were your programs made to fix STEP models?
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@normand They were for DXF. Most of my problems were very close vertices. You could use Meshlab to clean up close vertices maybe.

@daniel
Meshlab won't do. 3D CAD deals with B-rep (boundary representation), that's a whole different ball game than polygon mesh modeling. It's way more complex.
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