After so many months of development and waiting for Apple to get the problem resolved we finally managed to get 1.3 finished and uploaded to the Mac App Store. It should work fine from Yosemite to El Capitan. However, it's been hard to get this release done. Of course I did not rest while I waited for Apple to resolve the deploy issues I have been facing. And migrating all those various parts that I developed separately from each other has been a hard task. This might have caused bugs. I tried my best to validate everything works fine. But it's [...]

This is just a short update of what happened the last months and why we still have not been able to finally push 1.3 to the public. As you know, 1.3 comes with a lot of new features. The single most important feature is STEP import. I have detailed this in the last blog posts so this is just a quick recap: STEP is massive. It's an overly complex file format and data structure. As I didn't want to write an importer from scratch I used the amazing OpenCascade package. This has been complex and time consuming enough to integrate in [...]

Update December 16, 2016 Copper 1.3 is finally released. You should find it as a Mac App Store update or if you bought in our own store as an update notification when starting Copper. Update August 11, 2016 There is a new build available, Build 1999. We fixed a few minor bugs, but more importantly we hopefully fixed that issues with Mac Gate Keeper. Please let us know if you have trouble running the application. It's harder to import a part by accident (i.e. pressing Return key) by adding an "Are you sure" confirmation dialog Hopefully fixed a bug with code [...]

In our last post we gave a short outlook what to expect in 1.3 and when it's released. We said it would be released around end of march. Well, we didn't manage to deliver 1.3 in time. Let me describe what will be released with 1.3 and why we didn't get that finished in time and when you can expect it to be released: STEP-Import: Import your own 3D models (or the ones you downloaded from the manufacturer or 3dcontentcentral.com, tracepartsonline.net, grabcad.com and various others), setup materials and share them with the Copper community A global and personal material library will make the [...]

Today I released version 1.2.1. It's a quick bugfix release that fixes various stability issues that came with version 1.2. In the last version we did a lot of optimizations that proved not to be very clever in some places. For those interested: If you can't optimized the work to be done by optimizing the algorithms you have to get more work done in the same amount of time. On Computers this is done by making use of the CPU power that is available which is often not the case. For example Copper has to generate and load hundreds of 3D [...]

This release mainly focuses on optimizations, but brings a couple of new features that were now possible due to these optimizations. And Copper now comes with extensive Through Hole Part support in 3D with many more parts and a few more generators. Through Hole Parts and Generators Very important for quite a lot of our users: Through Hole Parts. In 1.2 we added quite a lot of them. And we have added procedural parts, too. Procedural parts are great as the whole geometry, materials, textures is created by software. This is especially useful with through hole parts like resistors, where you [...]

I did write quite a lot here about my motivation creating Copper. Before building Copper I created the 3D models of my PCB using Eagle Up and Sketchup. While I really liked the ease of use, I didn't like the way you have to "source" 3D parts. They must have been available in Sketchup file format and they had to have the correct orientation. I even had to build quite a lot of parts myself in Sketchup. Copper doesn't need anything of that. You search the part in the library and the only thing you have is to orient the [...]