Lorenzo, On Wed, 01 Sep 2010, Lorenzo Marcantonio wrote:
> You can see the little diagram in the IPC-7251 working draft which is > freely downloadable online at > > http://www.ipc.org/committeedetail.aspx?Committee=1-13 > I happen to have a bunch of .plb09 library files (all of the surface mount devices are even IPC-7351B with build dates such as 02/04/2009). I suppose I downloaded them for free and without requiring the acceptance of any license before they shut them off. They used to be in separate library update zip files on PCB Matrix' website. Do you know of any place where the V2009 (*.plb09) or earlier V6 (*.plb) file formats are documented? Or, anybody willing to reverse-engineer the format? I converted some by hand that I got from gEDA's library. Someone did the work to recalculate the lands using the IPC-7351 equations with an m4 script. I hand converted a bunch of chip capacitors and resistors to pcbnew modules (pcbnew's library chip capacitors were wayyyyy wrong). Rather than write some awk or perl script to generate modules from the .plb09 files (which might violate some unwritten copyright, and I say unwritten because there are no copyright notices on the files or in the archives whatsoever), I was considering modifying PCBNEW to read the files directly. Then rather than distribute the PLB files with PCBNEW, let the user go get a copy themselves (say, by forking out the $117 for the standard). Some vendors (TI/Luminary Micro) actually generate their own *.plb09 files. (Which begs the question: where did they get the format? Or do they just use LP Wizard or something.) Ahh, maybe it doesn't matter. The only thing I really was going to use them for was SMT chip capacitors, resistors and inductors: and of these the non-generic ones needed the manufacturer's recommended land pattern anyway. Some do not provide IPC-7351 values on their datasheets. Do you thing that purchasing the standard would shed some light on this library format? Or are the fields in the file just the (some of the) parameters that get stuffed into the equations? It seems that there are a lot of non-IPC things too (like silk screen clearance). Maybe all we need is a kind-of-a module-editor wizard that uses the calculations from IPC-7[23]51, A, B to guide the user and generate (and name) the module under module editor which can then be customized from there. It would still be nice for that wizard to read directly a vendor-supplied PLB file. What are your thoughts? --brian -- Brian F. G. Bidulock ¦ The reasonable man adapts himself to the ¦ [email protected] ¦ world; the unreasonable one persists in ¦ http://www.openss7.org/ ¦ trying to adapt the world to himself. ¦ ¦ Therefore all progress depends on the ¦ ¦ unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw ¦ _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
