Fab processes window

The Fab processes window is where a process is authored. It opens from Design → Fab processes… or from the toolbar’s Fab processes button, and it floats over the layout rather than blocking it — you can draw, and watch the Problems list recompute, while it is open.

Processes are a shared pool, so the window edits whichever process the strip shows, which need not be the one the viewport is built with: you can tune a molding profile while a soft-lithography stack drives the display. Which process a stack is built with is set in the Stack window.

The strip and the preset row stay pinned at the top and the rest scrolls, since the rule deck alone runs to sixteen rows.

The Fab processes window: the pool strip and name over the preset, compensation, corner radii, wall kinds and the rule deck

The process strip

The picker lists the design’s processes, and choosing one says which process the rows below edit. It changes nothing about the design and costs no undo step.

Beside it sit three buttons. + opens a menu of the built-in profiles and creates a fresh process from the one you pick. The copy button duplicates the shown process under a new name, which is how you diverge from a profile you have already tuned. The trash removes it, and is refused while any stack references it; the tooltip names the stacks to reassign first. That also covers the last process — with one left, every stack references it — so a design can never be left without one.

The row underneath reads who is using it: used by stacks: proto, prod, or not referenced by any stack. The name field beside it renames the process on Enter or focus loss; the stacks pointing at it follow the rename.

The preset row

Load preset reseeds the whole process from a built-in profile — its wall kinds, corner radii, compensation, published deliverables and rule deck are all replaced, as one undo step. The process keeps its name, and the stacks pointing at it keep pointing at it.

It is a one-way load rather than a setting that reads back. Once a process exists it is just its authored data, so there is nothing for the control to display: you load a starting point and tune it from the rows below.

The rows below cover everything this window edits, with one exception: the deliverables a process publishes come from the profile it was loaded from and have no row of their own. What each process hands out is listed in the export dialog.

Compensation

Shrink measured is off until someone has measured how this process’s finished parts compare to the drawn size, and while it is off the row reads not measured. Ticking it reveals a percent field for the measured shrink, with the correction it derives shown dimmed beside it (→ export scales ×1.00503). You author the shrink because that is the number a datasheet quotes and a test part gives; the scale is what export applies.

The dim sentence under the row is the statement every exported file will carry, live. It is there because ticking the box and typing 0 is a different claim from leaving it unticked — parts land on size against nobody has checked — and the sentence is where the difference is visible.

Corner radii

Two fields in µm, inner (void) and outer (material): the radii this process forms at a corner of the void and at a corner of the material. 0 means sharp, which is an ordinary formed state rather than an unset one.

Wall kinds

One row per profile — Vertical, Fillet, Draft — each with a checkbox saying whether the process can form it. A kind left unticked cannot be chosen anywhere the design authors walls.

Fillet and Draft take a parameter, and a ticked row carries its forming default beside the checkbox, in µm radius or ° draft. A row with no default published reads a dimmed 0, which means the author supplies the parameter per feature. Vertical takes none, so its row is the checkbox alone.

Unticking a kind the design is already using is allowed and changes no geometry. The Problems list is the feedback: every feature asking for a kind the process cannot form gets a row.

The rule deck

☐ name │ threshold │ ✕

One row per rule the app knows, whether or not this process carries it. The checkbox says whether the deck carries that rule: ticked, the rule is checked and the row shows its threshold; unticked, the rule is not checked at all, which is what an absent rule means. Ticking one seeds a starting threshold at Error severity for you to type over.

The severity button flips ✕ error and ⚠ warning — the two glyphs the Problems list uses.

Four rules are authorable but have no checker, and their rows say not checked yet — ticked or not — so that silence is never read as a pass. Tick one and the Problems panel repeats it under the report. Which four they are is Design rules.

Most thresholds are one number: µm for a length, × for a ratio, or a bare count. Three kinds carry more:

Min inner radius and Min outer radius have a floor checkbox. Unticked, the rule reads the process’s own forming radius live and the row says = forming default; ticked, it is an explicit floor, seeded at that radius and then relaxed downward.
Fits extent has a shape picker — disc with a ⌀, or rect with a width and a height — and a margin, all in µm.
Allowed depths and Allowed depth increments open an indented list of intervals, one row each: a min, a max checkbox that closes the interval (unticked, the row reads open), the max field when closed, and a trash. The + below adds an interval. An empty list checks nothing.

Every number here can be dragged as well as typed. A drag previews as you go and lands as one undo step when you release, and the Problems list catches up at that point rather than on every tick of the drag.

Editing a process no stack is built with rebuilds nothing — it is still a design edit, and it still costs an undo step.

Experiware Guide