Dan McMahill wrote: > John Griessen wrote: > >> I'm planning on redoing my silk outlines that are compact like that, and >> make courtyard boxes instead, because robots placing parts is a wonderful >> thing. > > but if they are your silk outlines, can't you directly produce an xy > file instead of trying to guess at it later? > > It seems the original goal was to deal with output from xy challenged > cad tools.
yeah, that's right. And if some output has no courtyard, you can't use that for an algorithm to "see" footprints... Hmm... Another way to "see" a footprint in gerber data is by the combination of top copper and top soldermask or solderpaste. A pad that has top copper exiting one way is related to the near pad in the other direction. Sounds like a much more difficult algorithm to code, but exactly what we humans do when seeing a top copper layer. Dan McMahill wrote: ========== "So for any symmetric part, I can actually say with some confidence that the center will be correct in pcb's output. " ============ One good place for a GUI for updating XY PnP pick and place files would be a pcb plugin. If we made gerbv output pcb data, we could make a workflow of gerbv then pcb to tweak the XY file. gerbv is supposedly close to having library capability -- so you could call it from another program, so that could be a way to have a pcb plugin that pulls in data from gerber format, then you tweak it in a GUI. Stuart Brorson wrote: ============== "do a 2D autocorrelation of the target pattern on the unknown image (i.e. the Gerber image). " ===== This could be a real speed up tool! Thanks for the idea! John -- Ecosensory Austin TX _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user