At 03:42 AM 7/17/2007, Alfonso Baz wrote: >Unfortunately I can't seem to find a way of producing gerber files with pad >holes showing for through hole components. > >Is there a way of accomplishing this?
First of all, I don't think you really want those holes in the Gerbers used for etching the board. It creates some potential problems with copper slivers. However, it is not difficult to convert a drill file in Excellon format to a gerber file with flashes for round pads of the size matching the holes. You could then subtract this file (negative plot) from the positive file for the layer, and use this combination to view the holes. I wouldn't use if for fab. I wrote such a program in Basic at one time, though I did it a bit differently, I used it for imports of gerbers to recreate a PCB file from them. The drill file was thus analyzed and used to take solid circular flashes into pads with holes of the proper size. This is not difficult. It's worth knowing the file formats, or at least being able to look at a reference and use it to decode and manipulate what is there. Sometimes, with this, you can do what you can't do in the CAD programs themselves. However, you can view holes in your Protel file, and I think you can view the drill file in CAMtastic. Why isn't that good enough? (You can also import your drill plot; if you use the proper format, you'll be able to see your exact hole centers and you could visually see that these are the centers of the displayed holes. Protel gets, or used to get, haven't check this lately, a little flakey down in the microinch region. If there are minor variations from roundoff in three-place Gerber, you can get a little better than that with your Gerber settings.... ____________________________________________________________ You are subscribed to the PEDA discussion forum To Post messages: mailto:[email protected] Unsubscribe and Other Options: http://techservinc.com/mailman/listinfo/peda_techservinc.com Browse or Search Old Archives (2001-2004): http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] Browse or Search Current Archives (2004-Current): http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
