NIST STEP File Analyzer and Viewer
With these instructions you can build the NIST STEP File Analyzer and Viewer (SFA) from the source code. SFA generates a spreadsheet and visualization from an ISO 10303 Part 21 STEP file. More information, sample spreadsheets and visualizations, and documentation about SFA is available on the website including the STEP File Analyzer and Viewer User Guide.
The NIST STEP to X3D Translator is used by the SFA Viewer to convert STEP b-rep part geometry to X3D and has its own source code and executable.
Prerequisites
Microsoft Excel is required to generate spreadsheets. CSV (comma-separated values) files will be generated if Excel is not installed.
Install the IFCsvr toolkit that is required to read STEP files.
- Run the IFCsvr installation file 'ifcsvrr300_setup_1008_en-update.msi' from the 'files' directory
- Use the default installation folder
- You might have to run the installation file from a temporary directory such as C:/Users/username/AppData/Local/Temp
- After the toolkit is installed, the license agreement can be found in C:/Program Files (x86)/IFCsvrR300/doc
- The IFCsvr toolkit was developed by SECOM Co., Ltd. in Japan through 2009 and has been modified by NIST to include STEP schemas. It used to be available in a Yahoo Group.
Download the SFA files from the GitHub 'source' directory to a directory on your computer.
- The name of the directory is not important
- The STEP File Analyzer and Viewer is written in Tcl
- Some of the Tcl code is based on CAWT
freewrap wraps the SFA Tcl code to create an executable.
- Download freewrap651.zip from https://sourceforge.net/projects/freewrap/files/freewrap/freeWrap%206.51/ More recent versions of freewrap will not work with wrapping SFA.
- Extract freewrap.exe and put it in the same directory as the SFA files that were downloaded from the 'source' directory.
Several Tcl packages not included in freewrap also need to be installed.
- teapot.zip in the 'files' directory contains the additional Tcl packages
- Create a directory C:/Tcl/lib
- Unzip teapot.zip to the 'lib' directory to create C:/Tcl/lib/teapot
Build the STEP File Analyzer and Viewer
- Open a command prompt window and change to the directory with the SFA Tcl files and freewrap.
- To generate the executable sfa.exe, enter the command:
freewrap -f sfa-files.txt
Optionally build the command-line version:
- Download freewrapTCLSH.zip from https://sourceforge.net/projects/freewrap/files/freewrap/freeWrap%206.51/
- Extract freewrapTCLSH.exe to the directory with the SFA Tcl files
- Edit sfa-files.txt and change the first line 'sfa.tcl' to 'sfa-cl.tcl'
- Edit sfa-cl.tcl similar to sfa.tcl above
- To generate sfa-cl.exe, enter the command: freewrapTCLSH -f sfa-files.txt
Other
- Some features are not available in the user-built version including: tooltips, unzipping compressed STEP files, automated PMI checking for the NIST CAD models, and inserting images of the NIST test cases in the spreadsheets. Some of the features will be available if the NIST-built version is run first.
- Internally at NIST, SFA is built with ActiveTcl 8.5.18 32-bit and the Tcl Dev Kit which is now an open source project.