Research And Development On A STEP-Based CAD/CAM Platform

With the development and application of CAD/CAM technologies, it's more and more important to construct a miniature CAD/CAM system for special applications. Commonly, there are not strong functions required in such a miniature system, such as solid modeling and surface modeling, but it can get the model data designed by a high-end CAD software via the dedicated or standard interfaces. All things the miniature CAD/CAM System just to do are to save the model data, display the model or excute other special management and operation.In this paper, a miniature CAD/CAM software platform with different modules is designed, and this platform has a certain degree of scalability. Then two modules(model data management and visualization) are developed with the use of object-oriented programming techniques and C++ language in Visual Studio 2005, and the common modules from open-source code are integrated into this platform.Standardized product data exchange technologies become more important with the development of CAX technologies, they achieve the sharing and exchange of data among the various CAX systems. As the new standard, the STEP is being favored by more and more CAX systems. This paper in-depth studies the STEP, then analysises the structure of the STEP neutral document and the format of the entities information which is described in the neutral document. And then, a STEP post-processor based AP203 and AP214 is designed and developed, and it will be used to read model data from a STEP neutral document.Finally, the post-STEP processor is integrated into the miniature CAD/CAM platform, after tested, the target platform can view all kinds of solid models. The platform can be applied to 3D simulation and virtual assembly.