Re: gEDA-user: pick and place ?plugin?footprints.c? for gerbv

[Dave N6NZ <n6nz@xxxxxxxx>]

John Griessen wrote:
> Steve Meier wrote:
>> I am a little confused here. Are we discussing taking a gerber file and
>> using it to generate the component location/rotations for a pick and
>> place machine?
>>
>> If we are wouldn't it be a lot easier to use the pcb file to generate
>> the file?
> Yes.  Lil Brother LLC's James Long says many of his low volume customers
> won't have a decent XY PnP file, so he wants a tools to deal with that
> and keep going forward, and just charging some for it.

I'm convinced that we should try to implement a seamless flow from pcb 
to Lil Brother.

First off, the current PnP file is probably pretty close.  So once we 
find out from James "where the semicolons go" its probably a simple 
matter of formatting to drive his machine directly.  In any case, it 
should be straight forward and we'll be able to spin revisions quite 
quickly and converge.

That gives us two things: 1) a direct process flow, which is useful 
immediately to pcb users, and 2) an instant test base for developing a 
gerber2pnp path.  We can take any foo.pcb and use it to test the gerber 
conversion tool, and that gives us the ability to test extensively and 
quickly off-line.  Testing a heuristic based pattern matching tool can 
be pretty tedious.  I can't think of a better way to get a high quality 
test base quickly.

-dave

> 
> There's a for sale software available for this business market niche that charges
> $8500 for such a program.
> 
> John
> 


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