I have my first board in PCB (20050315 Xaw) nearly ready for production and
want to have a (polygon) area where thick tracks are routed to be free of
soldermask.
I want to hand-solder solid copper wires there so that the board can handle
large currents. The component pads are not sufficient for that.
I have not seen a feature in PCB yet where i can draw lines or polygons on the
soldermask. Is this possible ?
Or can a free signal layer be grouped with the soldermask so that this contens
is added to the soldermask output when writing gerber files ?
As i have read that there are tools for gerber post-processing (gerbmerge and gbtiler) i thought that i can generate the normal gerber file for the soldermask
and another gerber file of a free signal layer where i place the polygon (after deleting all components).
But now i have the 2 gerber files which should be merged/overlapped to one
gerber file and i can't get them merged.
- gerbmerge should not be able to merge 2 files on the same positions (as the
author told me)
- gbtiler does not run correctly on my linux system (Suse 8.1 with some
packages updated).
Not even the supplied sample files are merged correctly. Has anyone seen this
problem before and knows why ?
This was with perl 5.8.0
Then i updated to newest stable release 5.8.7 , compiled all from source, all the tests from the perl installation makefile run well, but gbtiler still does
not. Any idea ?
Are there other gerber utilities available which can merge / overlap 2 gerber
files to one output file ?
Thanks
Michael
