At 10:46 AM 2/28/2002 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >Arcs are known to be fatal to a board outline. Protel apparently doesn't >handle them correctly.
The autorouter does not presently handle them correctly. The 3-D viewer was more recently written, however, so it is surprising that it does not handle arcs, if that is the source of the problem. It's not *too* surprising, however, the calculational problems of working with arcs are much more severe than with track, where the endpoints are defined in the primitive itself. Arcs are not like that. Apparently the 3-D viewer is looking for coincident endpoints to validate that the outline is patent, and it is not going to find them, perhaps, if arcs are involved. Instead it uses, according to the error message that was reported (I have not verified this) a "calculated" boundary. I'd expect that calculated boundary to be just fine in most cases. So what do we do with arcs in an outline? A fairly simple solution is to reduce them to line segments. One way to do this is to photoplot the outline using absolute coordinates, delete it, and import it back from the gerber. This will produce results which are indistinguishable, I'd expect, from keeping the original arcs, except that the outlines in the PCB file will now match exactly the outlines on the final plots, and the autorouter should be happy, and likewise, I'd think, the 3-D viewer. But with the 3-D viewer it is not so important, I expect. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Abdulrahman Lomax Easthampton, Massachusetts USA * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * To post a message: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * To leave this list visit: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/leave.html * * Contact the list manager: * mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * Forum Guidelines Rules: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/forumrules.html * * Browse or Search previous postings: * http://www.mail-archive.com/proteledaforum@techservinc.com * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
