Carlos Nieves Ónega wrote:
You may import drawings from DXF, but what about component positions,
for example? will you able to get a 3D model of your PCB board?
I have never used DXF files for 3D. It is pretty weak at 3D. It does
have Z information, and would probably work well enough for getting
component volumes. PCB is not going to be able to do anything with a
component volume, though.
There is another open ASCII format designed for MCAD/ECAD integration:
IDF. I use it everyday at work to exchange data between the mechanical
CAD and the electronic CAD programs (in both directions).
I don't know anything about IDF, and don't have time to study something
I don't have an immediate use for. My background is electronics design
and design automation, so all the mechanical CAD packages are new
territory for me -- I'm not exactly your first choice for mechanical CAD
work.
Let me be clear about my motivation: I wrote a 2D DXF processor for
another project, so I have become familiar with a particular DXF library
that is very robust for 2D information. Importing board outlines and
mounting hole placement seems like useful functionality, and is a
limited goal that I could probably accomplish. If other people would
find that functionality useful, I will look into it. If it is not
useful enough in that form to interest other users, I won't bother.
And while I'm stating my limitations, I don't understand DXF well enough
to use this library to *export* DXF from pcb -- that is a different,
much harder, problem. I can see where it would be very nice to export a
mechanical drawing of a pcb with component placement in a form that
could be imported into a mechanical package, but I think the project is
beyond my knowledge of DXF.
-dave
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