SolidOut now runs in the browser
The STL-to-STEP converter no longer needs a download — drop a mesh on the page and the conversion happens on your own machine.
The desktop build of SolidOut has been around for a while: drop in an STL, get back a STEP file with real analytic faces instead of a bag of triangles. The part everyone asked about was the download. Nobody wants to install a signed Mac app to convert one file.
So the engine now runs in the browser. Open Web Tools, drop a mesh on the page, and the conversion happens on your machine — the same stl2step engine, compiled to WebAssembly.
Nothing is uploaded
This is the part worth being precise about, because "runs in your browser" gets used loosely. Your mesh is never sent anywhere. The page loads the engine, and the engine reads the file locally. There is no upload endpoint, no queue and no copy of your geometry on a server, because there is no server doing the work.
That also means the page is honest about its limits: a huge mesh is bounded by your own memory, not by someone's free tier.
What it is good at
- Prismatic parts — planes stay planes, and the seams between them come out as real edges rather than a fan of facets
- Cylinders, bores and fillets that were round before somebody exported them to a mesh
- Anything you need to open in CAD again without retracing it by hand
It is a reconstruction, not magic. A mesh has already thrown information away, and no converter puts that back. What this one does is stop throwing away the information that is still there.
Where it lives
Under Web Tools in the nav, at makerinparadise.com/solidout/. The engine is stl2step — my own, MIT licensed, so you can read exactly what it does to your geometry.
The desktop apps are still there for batch work and for machines that would rather not hand a 200 MB mesh to a browser tab.