Exporting

Every export is a download. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is processed on a server, and nothing about your design leaves the machine.

Format-by-format detail is on Export formats. This page is the workflow.

Before you export

Four things, in order. They take a minute and they save prints.

X-ray the model. CAD Preview → X-ray. Is every channel connected the way you meant? This is where a junction that did not snap becomes obvious.
Explode, on a two-piece chip. Are the bonding faces clean?
Read the Design checks panel. Not to obey it — nothing there blocks you — but so that whatever happens next is a decision rather than a surprise.
Save the project. ⌘S. An STL cannot be opened back into OpenChip.

STL — for printing

CAD Preview → Export → STL.

On a two-piece chip you get both pieces, so you can lay them out on the plate yourself.

Binary STL, in millimetres. Every slicer reads it and every slicer defaults to millimetres, so the numbers land without conversion.

Then: Orientation and supports.

OpenSCAD — for editing

CAD Preview → Export → OpenSCAD.

You get editable source with the chip parameters hoisted to the top as named variables. Change chip_width and re-render.

Reach for this when you need something OpenChip cannot express — a mounting boss, a registration pin, an imaging window, an odd port. Channels come out as chains of hull(), which is the standard OpenSCAD loft idiom and reproduces the same taper the viewport shows.

SVG — for figures

Draw → Export → SVG, or from the presentation bundle.

A clean labelled schematic with real dimension annotations — not a screenshot. No selection rings, no snap crosses, no hover state.

Vector, so it scales to any figure size.

PNG — for a quick picture

A raster snapshot of the current view. Quickest route to an image. For print, prefer the SVG or a 300 DPI presentation bundle.

The presentation bundle

⇧⌘E / Ctrl+Shift+E, or Present in the top bar.

One ZIP containing the schematic, the CAD view, the flow heatmap, and a composed 16:9 sheet laying all three out together with a title.

Pick a DPI — 96, 150, 300 or 600. The vector sources are re-emitted at the target resolution, not resampled from a screen rendering, which is the difference between a figure that survives a projector and one that visibly does not.

The sheet is 16:9 because its destination is almost always a projector or a screen-shared deck, and letterboxing a portrait page into one is the most common way a good figure ends up unreadable.

Saved images

Exports can be kept with the project rather than only downloaded — schematic SVGs, CAD snapshots, heatmaps. They are stored inline in the .openchip file, so a project with several high-resolution snapshots gets large. Delete them from the Project menu when you no longer need them.

Useful when you want a record of what a design looked like at a particular point, travelling with the design.

What does not export

The design checks. They are computed from the project; send the .openchip if the recipient needs them.
Fluid assignments and results. Also in the project file. The heatmap image is a picture of them, not the data.
Your printer profile travels in the project file, not in any image or mesh.