Re: gEDA-user: My board is back

[David SMITH <dave.smith@st.com>]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2004 at 10:50:34AM +0200, Wojciech Kazubski wrote:
> > It looks pretty good, but while enjoying the enclosed popcorn, I noticed
> > that the TO-220 hole size seems a little small. 0.020" for a pin that is
> > about 0.060" wide.
> 
> This may come from old times and be done by someone drilling pcbs himself.
> In this case it is convinent to have all drill holes reduced to 15-20mils to 
> act as a guide for manual drilling. 
> 
> Better idea would be an option to reduce drill to that value when creating 
> postscript printout. I think it should be easy to implement, just force the 
> drill size to specified value when parsing the file for postscript output.
> I think that PCB should not forget about those who want to make simple boards 
> at home.

Some (most) PCB packages have different parameters to specify the drill size
and the centre hole.  This way, the Excellon drill file has the correct
sizes in, and the person drilling the hole can still have a small guide hole.

I don't know whether PCB does this.

Also, the PCB package I use (not PCB I'm afraid...) uses square pads for
TO220s, so the pad can still be reasonably-sized, yet not have pad-pad DRC
problems.

-- 
David Smith            Work Email: Dave.Smith@st.com
STMicroelectronics     Home Email: David.Smith@ds-electronics.co.uk
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