The 3D preview
The CAD Preview tab shows the actual solid — the block with your channels subtracted from it — and rebuilds it as you change anything.
Driving it
Section titled “Driving it”| Gesture | Does |
|---|---|
| Drag | Orbit. |
| Scroll, or right-drag | Zoom, or pan. |
| Fit | Re-frame the chip. |
| Top / Front / Right | Snap to that axis, orthographic, fit to the chip. |
| Persp / Ortho | Swap projection without changing the view. |
The grid on the ground is the build plate. The camera starts at a three-quarter angle and frames the chip when the first model arrives; after that, rebuilds leave the camera where you put it, so press Fit after a large change. The chip casts a shadow onto the plate, and hard edges are shaded crisply rather than smoothed over, so a port socket reads as a recess rather than a circle drawn on the face.
Snapping to a view
Section titled “Snapping to a view”Top, Front and Right point the camera straight down one axis and switch it to orthographic — parallel edges stay parallel, so two channels that are meant to run level actually line up on screen instead of converging with perspective. Each snap fits the chip to the viewport on its own; there is no need to Fit afterwards.
The Persp / Ortho button to their right does the same swap by hand, without moving the camera — you keep whatever angle you were looking from, at the same apparent size, just without (or with) perspective distortion.
Orbiting drops back to perspective on its own: once you rotate away from an axis snap the view is no longer axis-aligned, so there is nothing left for orthographic to buy you. Panning and zooming leave it alone — moving around inside a top view is still a top view.
Display modes
Section titled “Display modes”Solid — the printed part as it will look. The mode for checking proportions, port bosses and overall shape.
Wireframe — edges only. Useful for seeing how the mesh is tessellated, particularly around a curved channel or a sphere. Let the view settle before judging it, or you are counting the facets of the coarse pass rather than the ones that will be exported.
X-ray — the block goes translucent and the channel network shows through it. This is the mode that finds mistakes. A junction that did not connect, a channel that stops short of its port, a chamber in the wrong place — all obvious here and all invisible in Solid.
Make a habit of switching to X-ray before every export.
Isolate the channels
Section titled “Isolate the channels”In X-ray, Isolate goes the rest of the way: the block is not drawn at all and you are left looking at the fluid path on its own — channels, chambers, port bores and drainage vents, the whole void the resin has to come out of.
Two ways to draw it:
| Mode | Shows |
|---|---|
| Opaque | The shape reads as a solid. The clearer of the two for judging the form of a run. |
| Transparent | Crossing runs and buried chambers, through whatever is in front of them. |
The camera re-frames when you enter or leave the mode. A 0.8 mm channel inside a 40 × 60 mm block is otherwise a speck in the corner of a view framed for the chip.
What you are looking at is the same cavity the build subtracts from the block, so it is exact rather than a second drawing of it. It is not a part, though: nothing in this view is printable, and an exported STL never contains it.
It also shows more than Channel void counts. That figure is the channels and chambers; the isolated shape includes the port bores and vents as well, so the two are not meant to match.
The glass, on a slide chip
Section titled “The glass, on a slide chip”A chip whose split type is Glass slide is drawn with the slide sitting in its pocket, translucent, so you can see which channels it covers — the question an empty pocket cannot answer.
It is not a part. The glass is never in the piece list, never counted into the chip volume, and never written to an STL: you buy it, you do not print it. See Capping with a glass slide.
Explode
Section titled “Explode”Separates the two halves of a two-piece chip so you can see the bonding faces. On a glass-slide chip it lifts the glass off the plate, so you can see the open channels it covers. On a monolithic chip, which has nothing to separate, the button is disabled.
Worth doing before you print: it is where you notice that a channel is open at the split plane where you did not mean it to be, or that the lid has a feature on it you did not expect.
The statistics
Section titled “The statistics”Above the parameters:
| Figure | What it is |
|---|---|
| Triangles | Mesh complexity. Affects file size and slicer time, not print quality. |
| Build time | How long the last rebuild took, in the worker. |
| Channel void | Internal volume in mm³. How much fluid the chip holds, and how much resin has to come out. |
| Ports | Count. |
| Chambers | Count. |
| Vents | Count of drainage vents, shown only when the chip has any. |
Channel void is the number to watch. It tells you the dead volume of your device, and on a monolithic chip it is the volume of uncured resin sitting inside after printing.
How it is built
Section titled “How it is built”The geometry comes from manifold-3d, the same kernel modern OpenSCAD uses internally, compiled to WebAssembly and run in a worker — so a rebuild does not freeze the interface.
The pipeline is straightforward constructive solid geometry: a box for the chip, each channel swept along its solved path at its lofted cross-section, the ports and chambers unioned in, the whole channel network subtracted from the block, and finally the split plane applied.
Two passes, coarse then fine
Section titled “Two passes, coarse then fine”Curved geometry has to be broken into flat facets somewhere, and how finely is a trade against how fast the chip keeps up with a slider. The preview does both:
| Pass | When | Tessellation |
|---|---|---|
| Coarse | ~90 ms after any change | Fewer facets, so the chip tracks a drag |
| Fine | ~350 ms after you stop | The same tessellation the STL is written at |
So while you are dragging you are looking at an approximation, and once the view settles you are looking at the exported mesh. If you want to judge a curve’s smoothness, let go first.
Both passes come from the same kernel and the same code path — the difference is only how many facets each is allowed, never what the geometry means.
When it is slow
Section titled “When it is slow”A large gradient generator with dozens of segments takes longer than a Y-junction — it is more boolean operations. The panel shows the build time so you can see what you are paying.
If a rebuild is taking long enough to be annoying, the usual causes are a very large number of segments, or chambers on every corner of a long network.
What to check before exporting
Section titled “What to check before exporting”- X-ray. Is every channel connected the way you meant?
- Explode, on a two-piece chip. Are the bonding faces clean?
- Channel void. Is the internal volume roughly what you expected? A number far off usually means a channel is much wider than intended.
- The Design checks panel, which is docked below this tab too.
- Design checks — reading the panel.
- Exporting — STL, OpenSCAD, and the rest.