Hi all gEDA users, As of last december I'm trying to write a DXF exporter for pcb.
Currently exporting straight traces, filled rectangles and circles (drill holes) goes well, polygons and curved traces and a round end cap style are a bit more difficult to implement. So it's still experimental (it does create dxf files with entities and doesn't segfault every time the HID is started). I guess it will take the better part of Q1/2007 to finish this 0.0.1 release of this exporter. Now for the original poster. As I understand this one has to do with an importer for DXF entities. I can see a possible usability of both exporter and importer if we want to improve the development of Printed Circuit Assembly (PCA). PCA != PCB , so for now we develop pcb's with pcb by the electronics oriented people and PCA by the mechanical oriented people with a mechanical CAD application. Speaking for myself, as a mechanical oriented person, the entities I would like to have in DXF-files for PCA are: 1) Outline contour as a polyline (and extrude this to board thickness). 2) List of XY-coordinates and top/bottom for all footprints (packages) exported as a list of XREF's. 3) Trace segments of top/bottom/inside ?? layers as info. Basically 3) would be eye-candy because of the limitations of what mechanical oriented people could/would like to do with it. OTOH for physical engineers this could be used for FEA in RF simulations, heat transfer, EMC and whatnot as long as your FEA software knows what to do with DXF files. YMMV ;-) With these files a mechanical 3D model could be made to see wether the PCA would fit in the virtual product. If changes would be neccesary, a DXF importer for pcb would be handy for changed outlines or XY-coordinates or top/bottom information of the packages involved. As I recall a pcb "importer" is a concept not yet implemented in the HID way of doing things, for it is not a printer and is not an exporter. Printer and exporter HID's are driven by a GUI or batch HID. So for importing stuff we would need some kind of (batch) UI, either GUI or TUI or CLI to drive the DXF importer. Just my EUR 0.01 Kind regards, Bert Timmerman. -----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Namens Carlos Nieves Ónega Verzonden: woensdag 7 februari 2007 19:12 Aan: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; geda-user Onderwerp: gEDA-user: Re: dxf? El mar, 06-02-2007 a las 16:31 -0800, Dave N6NZ escribió: > 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. Of course it is useful! Please go ahead! Carlos _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user
