Hi Mike, Actually we have a large number of old 'hand taped' artworks here and use an outside service bureau to convert them into gerbers. There is a company here in San Diego, CadArt Services, that has the facilities and the expertise to do this sort of artwork restoration very well for about 40 dollars a sheet. There is always cleanup for them to do to the scans as there will be areas on the artwork (or PCB) that reflect into the camera and cause aberrant 'flotsam' or specs and lines that are undesirable. They can convert their gerbers into AutoCAD or some other format too. I even heard of a guy that was milling off the layers of a board, one at a time, and photographing the circuits to recreate lost artwork. I guess it is done, but sounds like a lot of work! - Bill Brooks
Bill Brooks PCB Design Engineer , C.I.D. DATRON WORLD COMMUNICATIONS, INC 3030 Enterprise Court Vista, CA 92083 Tel: (760)597-1500 Ext 3772 Fax: (760)597-1510 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] IPC Designers Council, San Diego Chapter http://www.ipc.org/SanDiego/ http://home.fda.net/bbrooks/pca/pca.htm -----Original Message----- From: Robison Michael R CNIN [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, October 18, 2001 6:33 AM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: [PEDA] gerbers from a scan ?? hello, i guess our customer on this board rebuild job is happy with us and has given us a bunch more boards to do. over half of them are simple two-sided boards. with no existing gerbers, up til now i've been recreating these in protel with a stripped board and a set of calipers. this issue has been sitting on the backburner for me a while, but bob wolfe mentioned something close to it and now my interest is piqued. there is another facility here on base that can take an existing board that's stripped and somehow scan or photograph the surface and generate gerbers from that. they want me to go over and check it out and give them an idea of whether this is a good idea and what kind of problems might be involved with this process. my question: what am i likely to find when i go over there? i'm going to assume that there is some scanning or photographic hardware thats associated with some software program that converts a raster image into the vectorized gerber files. are you guys familiar with this kind of setup? what are some of the software/ hardware setups employed for this? surely its better than me sitting here re-creating the boards by hand. any comments will be appreciated. thanks, miker * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * To post a message: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * To leave this list visit: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/leave.html * * Contact the list manager: * mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * Forum Guidelines Rules: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/forumrules.html * * Browse or Search previous postings: * http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
