STEP Python Interface for Digital Twin Manufacturing

The steptools package wraps the STEP Tools APIs with a Python interface for high-level operations on STEP-NC process descriptions and STEP assemblies. It also provides STEP data classes and ARM concept indexes, previously only available in C++, for detailed work in areas not covered by the high-level operations.

We are releasing this package with a license that allows anyone to read models at least until the end of 2023. Our goal is to simplify use of STEP-NC process with existing CNCs and promote new manufacturing experiments with STEP and STEP-NC models. You can find STEP-NC sample data on ap238.org. The extension can also be used to author new models, but this requires a separate license key.

Documentation, including example programs and detailed description of the classes, can be found below:

• Documentation
• Install and Setup
• Example Making CNC Codes
• STEP-NC sample data

The ISO 10303 standards cover a broad range of industrial data. You can find diagrams of the STEP concepts (high-level, represented by a graph of data objects) and data object (low-level, single normalized instance) definitions below. Click on any definition to get a text description of its meaning.

• STEP Concepts - ARM
• STEP Data Definition - AIM

The steptools package is built for Windows, Linux and MacOSX, on Python 3.7 and up.

About

STEP Tools, Inc. is a commercial software company that has been building software infrastructure for STEP CAD, STEP-NC CAM/CNC, and IFC BIM tools since 1991. We have deep technical knowledge of the ISO 10303 and related standards.

The python interface is built on the STEP Tools v20 C++ libraries with latest STEP AP242 and STEP-NC AP238 schemas covering digital twin manufacturing, machine tool kinematics machining process enhancements, full-fidelity semantic tolerances, tesselated models and point cloud data, as well as the CAD assemblies with full-fidelity brep solid geometry that made STEP indispensable since 1995.

For the past thirty years these C++ libraries have powered the product data in commercial CAD, analysis, and visualization systems and are the fastest and most reliable libraries for making, using, and manipulating STEP, STEP-NC, IFC, and CIS/2.