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Re: gEDA-user: Gerber

Donato Azevedo wrote: 
Hi everyone,
I found on my father's garage, laying around a corner, a camm2 machine

http://www.cadigital.com/camm2.htm

and was wondering if I could use it to create PCBs. It was once used
to carve pictures into brass plates, so I figured: why not use it to
create printed circuit boards?

Thing is, it was used with autocad ( the vendor only supplies drivers
for autocad )..

Is there anyone who can tell me wether I can or not use it with geda
to create PCBs?


hey, that thing looks pretty cool.  I want one too!

It sounds to me like it can take hp-gl. I'll bet it wouldn't be too hard to write a hp-gl HID for pcb. However.... you need negatives right? In other words, you need to draw everywhere where you don't want copper. At least I'm assuming that your machine isn't smart enough to do the conversion. Also this thing wouldn't understand the polygons that are part of RS-274-X (current gerber) and PCB takes advantage of that for power/ground planes.

So I'll bet what you really need is some software for taking gerbers, tracing out the edges of the copper and then milling away the remaining areas of copper. This problem would not be unique to PCB but any system which produces gerbers.

When I've used milling machines for super quick pcb prototypes, there was always a piece of software which processed the gerbers to produce the actual instructions for the machine. When the machine actually did its work it started by milling along the edge of every trace and pad. After that step, the boards would actually be functional but there would be a lot of extra copper. Then the machine would basically just scan back and forth across the board to mill away this leftover stuff.

I wonder how precise the depth control on the camm2 is. On the board milling machine I used, there was a little presser foot that rode across the board to help control the depth.

-Dan