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Re: gEDA-user: freedog pictures
Since it's quite common to get reference designs that include gerbers, I
was wondering if it would be feasible to to convert these back into,
effectively, a pcb footprint. I'd have thought there was enough
information in the gerber and drill files to do this - but I admit I
haven't thought it through.
I talked with a friend of mine (who is our PCB layout guy) about this
once, and the sense that I got was that, while it appears that it
should be a simple thing to do, it is a non-trivial problem.
My understanding is that gerber files are simply artwork -- put copper
(or remove copper from) here. Put a silkscreen that looks like that
there. Drill holes here. The hard part is that while it may be
obvious to us humans that that section right there is U4, there is
nothing in the gerber files that associate the characters "U" and "4"
on the silk screen layer with the bunch of artwork on layer 1.
I'm not saying it can't be done, and I have an interest in seeing it
get done as well, it seems like it is a tough nut to crack. (Please
take all of these comments with the very large grain of salt that they
deserve.)
When I started thinking about this some more as I was writing this
email, I started thinking: Gee, what if I were to create a netlist
from the gerber file, and then write some sort of netlist correlator
that would compare the generated netlist to a netlist produced by
gschem and rename/renumber parts until they were identical. The
problem, as I see it, with that approach is the gerber file will show
a bunch of traces coverging on a certain area of the board in a
certain pattern, but there's nothing to really associate them with the
part that will be soldered on those lands. (The pick and place file
could probably help here, but I don't think I've ever seen those
distributed with the reference designs.)
Anyway, that's my $0.02 of rain for sombody's parade :-)
--wpd
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