Re: gEDA-user: soliciting suggestions on making drill/fabricationdrawings from Excellon drill files, or another PCB manufacturer

[Andreas Andersson <e92_aan@e.kth.se>]

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Charles Lepple wrote:

[snip]

> I wouldn't be so concerned about the drill program (after all, it works
> fine in gerbv) but Lavenier's (sp?) ViewMate program misaligns the drill
> and Gerber files, and so does freedfm.com (4pcb.com's online
> design-for-manufacturability checker).

Hmm, well, I make no guarantees that gerbv does the right thing
here, this could be a case of having origins that aren't at (0,0).
Seems to (and bloody well should) work, but it's not quite as tested
as I would like it to be.
Could you send me the files so I can verify this? Just any
gerber/drill files made from pcb will do, really. I have to put in a
fix for yet another broken version of Orcad sometime soon, so I
might as well look into this at the same time...

BTW, I usually use GerbTool as a reference, there's an evaluation
version available at http://www.gerbtool.com/download.htm
Not sure how crippled that is, but it could be worth a try.

> I'm not sure what I need, really. If anyone has a favorite PCB fab that
> can handle pcb's Gerber and drill files right off the bat, I'll consider
> it. Or, pointers to Excellon drill-to-drawing (PostScript, or whatever)
> code would be cool. I will probably have to write some code to get out
> of this mess, but if someone else has a good starting point, I'm all ears.

For cheap boards, there's always Olimex:  http://run.to/pcb
Limited to two layer boards with fairly large tracks, though.

As for NC drill to drill-drawing, I guess it shouldn't be _that_
hard to hack something together. Do you have a wishlist of what
you would like it to do, more exactly? A special drill drawing mode
for gerbv wouldn't be very hard to do, for instance, but since it
does not yet have postcript output that might not be acceptable(?).

/Andreas