Greetings, I should say hello since I am at least in part the instigator of this thread - I have just started working with BatchPCB and among the many things I need to fix is the system we have for panelizing boards. We are trying to move Sparkfun off proprietary tools - and we've made a lot of progress but ECAD in general and panelizing gerbers in particular (which is now my department) is a stumbling block. Irksome - but not insurmountable.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I am not a PCB expert - in fact I have never even used ECAD before being assigned this task, so I have plenty to learn - forgive me if I ask foolish questions or make foolish statements. However, I figured that there must be some code out there that I can work with - but I found that the lack of gerber support is striking, and I can't be the only one in the world that wants to import a gerber and edit it. The automatic panelization is really a secondary concern - I will have to visually inspect the results to ensure quality anyway, and add a product id to the silk layer so that we can tell what is what when 100 1/2 inch boards come back from production. So really the first issue is gerber importing and editting. I have a functional prototype parser design sketched out in php for the initial sizing routines on the web that I am planning to then pull into C++ for the "real" DRC code that runs after the designs are uploaded (which is currently in C++ and another issue but one that can wait for now). The notion that I had is to release this as a general purpose libgerber (or something like that) - it should be able to support additions of various import/export formats, initially I need gerber for Batchpcb and I am thinking of targetting PCB for export since I may be able to use it to panelize, possibly with the added nicety of at least partial automation and perhaps DRC checks to replace our somewhat rudimentary DRC code. I have looked at a number of different options now (including the python and perl panelizers), kicad, PCB, Electric and gEDA tools are the most likely candidates - PCB and gEDA are gaining weight due to issues of either complexity or maturity. I am, BTW a strictly open source programmer and it is understood here that anything useful I work on will remain open source (in fact, all the code I have written for Sparkfun so far has a GPL copyright notice on it even if it is not really likely to be useful outside of our context.). Even if I wind up just doing this myself, it will end up being released to the community. Breifly again, the general specs: 1. input gerber rs274x and Excellon/NC drill artwork and translate with accuracy to one of the open source tools formats. 2. be able to edit/panelize designs - minimum size 10x15 inches. 3. output resultant panel in rs274x format - _including_ a drill layer in rs274x (this is a Gold Pheonix production constraint). NC drill output is optional. 4. (wishlist) some ability to automate/script this process. 5. long term wish list: a DRC library that is independant of individual tool formats, drawing routines, objects or data structures - ie. generic, with a well defined API. The gerber library I mentioned above should be able to hand libdrc some data and get a report. The total effect would be a small suite of tools to translate between formats and automate artwork validation, which might then be employed in other contexts. Thanks for reading if you made it this far - sorry about the length and verbosity ... eh, just my nature i guess ;}. --erik -vv -- Erik Winn BatchPCB.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
