Export formats

Format	What it is	Reach for it when
STL	Triangle mesh, binary	You are printing.
OpenSCAD	Editable source	You want to change something OpenChip cannot express.
SVG	Schematic drawing	You are putting the layout in a paper or a lab book.
PNG	Raster snapshot	You need a picture, now.
Presentation bundle	ZIP of all of the above plus a composed sheet	You are making a figure or a slide.

STL

Binary, not ASCII. A serpentine runs to tens of thousands of triangles and ASCII STL is roughly six times the size for identical geometry. Every slicer reads binary.

Units. STL carries no unit information — it is bare floats. The whole model is built in millimetres and every slicer defaults to millimetres, so the numbers land correctly with no conversion. If your slicer asks, the answer is millimetres.

Normals are computed per triangle, not written as zeroes. Some slicers and mesh-repair tools use the stored normal to resolve ambiguous winding, and a zero normal makes them guess.

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

OpenSCAD

The point of this export is that you can open and edit the result.

It emits idiomatic primitives and operations — difference, union, hull, cube, cylinder, sphere — with the chip parameters hoisted to the top as named variables. Change chip_width at the top and re-render.

Channels become chains of hull() between consecutive thin cross-sections, which is the standard OpenSCAD idiom for a loft and reproduces the same taper the viewport shows.

Dumping the tessellated mesh as one polyhedron would be smaller and faster to render, and completely useless to edit — which would defeat the point of offering the format at all.

Use it when you need something OpenChip cannot express: a mounting boss, a registration pin, a window for imaging, an odd port.

SVG

A schematic, not a screenshot. It is written directly rather than through the canvas library’s own SVG export, so what comes out is a clean labelled drawing — no selection rings, no snap crosses, no hover state — with real dimension annotations that only make sense on paper.

It consumes the same solved loft the canvas renders, so the exported taper is the taper you were looking at.

Vector, so it scales to any figure size without resampling.

PNG

A raster snapshot of the current view. Quickest route to a picture. For anything going into print, prefer the SVG or the presentation bundle at 300 DPI.

The presentation bundle

⇧⌘E / Ctrl+Shift+E, or Export for presentation in the top bar.

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

Two decisions worth knowing about:

It is one file, and it also contains a ready-made figure. “One export” is best read literally: someone who asked for one file should get one file. But a bare archive of three images is not what goes into a slide, so the bundle carries the source assets and the composed sheet. Whichever you needed, it is in there.

SVGs are regenerated at the target resolution, not scaled up. The schematic and the heatmap are written as vectors by their own exporters, so asking for 300 DPI re-emits them at 300 DPI rather than resampling a screen rendering. That is the difference between a figure that survives a projector and one that visibly does not.

DPI choices are 96, 150, 300 and 600. The composed 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.

What is not exported

The printer profile and the design checks. They live in the .openchip file. Send that alongside if the recipient needs to know what the design was checked against.
Fluid assignments and flow results. Also in the project file. The heatmap image is a picture of them, not the data.
Anything about your machine. No settings, no paths, no identifiers.

See Exporting for the workflow, and The .openchip file format for what travels in the project file itself.