On 08/03/2012, at 12:10 AM, rickman wrote: > On 3/5/2012 7:15 AM, Dan McMahill wrote: >> On 3/4/2012 10:11 PM, rickman wrote: >>> The XYRS fiasco is only mitigated by the IPC standard defining the >>> convention for rotational and positional orientation. But that does not >>> include a file format unfortunately. Where would I find documentation >>> on your format? >> >> http://pcb.geda-project.org/pcb-20110918/pcb.html#Centroid-File-Format >> >> There are some newer formats that some vendors have tried to push as a >> replacement for what is used now (Excellon + Gerber). Probably my >> biggest complaint is that none of them really seem to be open formats. >> I.e. you either have to buy an expensive document to find out about it >> or work with a particular vendor who may require an NDA. > > Is that true for the IPC standards? It has been a while since I looked > into this, but I seem to recall being able to download anything I wanted > from their site.
They charge money for pretty much everything. One big exception to this was their gencam standard for PCB specification. They made it free to encourage people to use it. Apparently that didn't work, which is a shame, because some people put a lot of effort into it. This was also their second attempt to make a data transfer standard. The first was IPC-D-350 but I don't think anybody uses this anymore, except for IPC-D-356, maybe. They have certainly tried very hard to address this issue. It would be interesting to know why these standards failed to catch on. Perhaps it is simply because the IPC are not software vendors themselves. When a software company like Microsoft makes a standard it is because they need it themselves so they will actually be selling the software that uses it. The IPC, on the other hand, is creating a kind of platonic ideal and waiting for other people to implement it simultaneously (and identically). I read the draft gencam documents a long time ago and a software implementation seemed like hard work to me. Maybe I'm just lazy :) Actually, a smart thing for the IPC would have been to supply some libraries, if they could have arranged it. They could probably even have sold them. You may want to investigate odb++. I have no experience with it, but it is a standard that people actually use, though it is proprietary. It is also quite large. Steve. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Virtualization & Cloud Management Using Capacity Planning Cloud computing makes use of virtualization - but cloud computing also focuses on allowing computing to be delivered as a service. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51521223/ _______________________________________________ Gerbv-devel mailing list Gerbv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gerbv-devel
