Parallax CAD Drawings

Kenny Gardner

What program is used to open the CAD Drawings that Parallax releases for some of their parts?

Specifically, when I open the C3 case drawing in either Illustrator or Inkscape, the parts are fractions of an inch in size. Turbo Cad complains of incompatible file format.

I'm on a Mac and use Inkscape, but if I absolutely have to, I can run Windows in order to get some sort of file format that I can use on the Mac without problems.

Thanks for any insights,

Kenny

Franklin

what is the file extention of the file you are trying to open?

Kenny Gardner

It has a .DXF extension. Because of that, I assumed Turbo Cad would open it, but it won't touch it. Illustrator and Inkscape open it, and both want to know how I want it scaled, so I set the scaling to 1:1.

Spiral_72

It's a Drawing eXchange Format commonly / originally used to transfer drawings from AutoCAD to other programs.

There are free DXF converters, viewers and of course AutoCAD. It sounds like your units are incorrect when you bring it into Illustrator.... A common problem since if I remember correctly a DXF is "Unitless". I deal with this all the time.

There should be an option or place to tell Illustrator what units to use when you import the DXF. If not I bet if you scale the drawing to 25.4 in Illustrator it'll fix your problems.

Kenny Gardner

I bet if you scale the drawing to 25.4 in Illustrator it'll fix your problems.

Yea, that seems to have solved the problem. Both programs were opening in Inches and they should be assuming Millimeters.

Thanks much,

Kenny

Spiral_72

Yea! One gold star for me!

I'm glad it worked.


It'll really mess you up if your machine machine shop doesn't realize this and your 48" machined 316 stainless plate for an order that is already late.................. is quite a bit smaller than it's supposed to be! HA!