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Messages - sleemanj

2
DirtyPCBs support / Re: Circuit Maker outline
Your gerber files indeed do not include any outline.

If you search the eevblog forum for "outline" you will find a few threads about creating the outline in Altium Designer, I'd expect it's similar to Altium Circuit Maker... in short, "draw your outline on a Mechanical Layer and export that as your outline gerber"

http://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/alt ... d-outline/
http://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/i-c ... #msg110056
http://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/how ... #msg947495
3
DirtyPCBs support / Re: Panelization
[quote author="eauth"]???
You can see on your own picture that the mounting holes and mouse bites are non-plated. All holes that are not covered by copper on the top and/or bottom layer are non-plated.[/quote]

Actually on closer inspection, you are right in this instance

But here is another board, produced by dirtypcbs, using the exact same method of gerber and drill production, and as you can see the bites and mounting holes were plated in this case.

So in other words, it probably depends on what the human at the layup CAD station decides on the day. These are DirtyPCBs after all, you get what you're given.



4
DirtyPCBs support / Re: Panelization
[quote author="kalganian1"]Perfect, thanks bunches! From the photo it looks like the mouse bite holes and some (mounting) holes are non plated. [/quote]

No all the holes are plated, they just don't have any annular rings.  I don't think non-plated holes would be possible in a dirtypcb.
5
DirtyPCBs support / Re: Panelization
Here is the GKO from my last panelised order.


And here is what the result is.


So in other words, yes routed slots on the GKO is how it's done.

Note that this is only supported for the 2 layer boards, 4 layer boards do not support this, as per the Dirty PCBs specs.
6
DirtyPCBs support / Re: New User - Which files to upload?
Below are the export settings from my most recent.  The gerbs marked in Export All are the ones that get sent, notice the extensions.

Note that the fractional mils are just because they were originally specified in mm.

The offset X and Y is just whatever the defaults are.  The tools in the drill export are just the result of clicking the Auto button (and again the fractional mils are because I specify holes in mm usually)

Note that I export gerbs and drills in Inches.



7
DirtyPCBs support / Re: New User - Board trace design specification question
> I simple would like to know what the minimum trace width is,  the minimum spacing

Min w/s   5/5mil(O/L)
(w = width, s = space, O/L = Outer Layer I think)

But personally I wouldn't go under 6/6.

> the minimum clearance from traces to the edge of the board,

I think the same as above, but I would always use more, about 0.5 to 1mm border if I can, although I have the DRC set to 12mil (0.3mm) and have had DirtyPCBs produce boards with that no issues at all.  I'm just conservative if I can be.

> minimum drill size

Min diameter of finished hole   12mil  (0.3mm)

> minimum annular ring.

In theory the drill position accuracy is 2mil, so even 5 mil would be ok without risk of blowing out, I effectively use 6 mil for teeny vias and it works fine so far.

For what it's worth, here are the DipTrace DRC settings I used last with DirtyPCBs: http://imgur.com/a/k6OnG

Note that I have the DRC set to 8 mil minimum width, probably on the very conservative side, but by the same token, more copper more better.
9
DirtyPCBs support / Re: Checking drill file accuracy
gerbv has no issues with loading an Excellon drill file with a .drl extension, it should show exactly the holes, at the correct size, without any manual scaling, anything you have to do like that indicates a problem in your files.

I would say then, that your .drl file is not in fact an Excellon drill file, which is the type of file that is required.

If you are making a simple 2 layer board with only plated holes (no unplated holes, I don't know if they are even supported by Dirty), then you should only be providing the single Excellon drill file - with a .txt file extension, and the other gerber layer files (gt[lso], gb[lso] and gko for the outline).

The extension is just that, a file extension that allows the board house to recognise what layer is what, converting an Excellon drill file with a ".drl" extension to a ".txt" file is exactly renaming the file.

If you posted your gerbers zipped up it might make it clearer.  And specify which software you generated them from.
10
DirtyPCBs support / Re: My first order came in - Perfect
The "cutout" rectangle is present in the top & bottom mask layers, and not present in the top copper layer (that is, it's excluded from the pour on that layer).  There is nothing to specifically show that this rectangle should be a routed cut in the gerbers, but one might see how a rushed board-house worker might see this area and think "they obviously want this area routed out but forgot to put it in the outline" :-/

I note that your file names have a "double extension", you provided (in the zip above at least) this filename "epaperle-Edge.Cuts.gml" perhaps the board house has problems with double extention file names, perhaps next time call it "epaperle-Edge-Cuts.gml" instead. 

[quote author="eauth"]The board outline should be available on **all** layers.[/quote]

As far as I know, and as far as I have provided to DirtyPCBs in the past without issue, the outline should only be in one file, which is named with file extension GML/GKO/GBR

http://www.dirtypcbs.com/about.php

> Only the Board Outline (GML/GKO/GBR) is required.
> Multiple outlines: if you include multiple board outlines in your file, the industry standard dictates that the SMALLEST OUTLINE will be used.
11
DirtyPCBs support / Re: NEW SITE: no status update, moving servers
[quote author="ian"]. That will bring back the problem that Hotmail spams all our emails, but we can deal with that later. We are also moving our email to rack space as our own server has become nearly unusable from china. [/quote]

I use Mailgun from my AWS Ec2 machines for sending transactional mails, works great.  Mailgun is owned by Rackspace, so, yeah go that going for it.  Very easy to setup just add the appropriate DNS records, can connect to it over SMTP (use port 587 to avoid the AWS limit there) or HTTP API (which is what I use).  Have not noticed any particular problem with delivery to hotmail, shared IP pool does get the occasional dirty IP but support will swap you to a clean one if you ask no problem - or of course you can pay them for a dedicated IP, but best to have significant volumes before you do that.

There is also Amazon's own SES, but I've been a bit iffy about using that personally.

PS: If you are going to AWS, here's an idea for solving your image generation problem - setup an simple EC2 instance which could sit there polling a folder (ftp, ssh, nfs, whatever) for .zip'd gerbers, pick one off, run through gerbv using the script I put on the gerbv mailing list or whatever, and fire the resulting images back.  Once it's all working, take it as an ABI (EC2 instance image), then you would be easily able to spin up multiple copies of that instance to parallelize processing of large back-logs of gerber-to-image processing as the need arose.
12
DirtyPCBs support / Re: Price hike coming! But boards are even cheaper for VDPs
Since we are using this thread for suggestions...

Is there a practical reason for having "5x5", like is 5 a divisor of the panel size or something?  Because it always struck me as just a fraction too small, why, because you really can't comfortably fit an Arduino Uno shield footprint in 5x5, ideally you'd want  another 5mm on one side so 5.5x5 would comfortably work.

PS: Ian did you get that script I posted to the gerbv mailing list for you.
13
DirtyPCBs support / Re: Price hike coming! But boards are even cheaper for VDPs
[quote author="ian"]This is my current plan:

1. Raise board prices so protopacks are $1 more expensive

[/quote]

Sounds fine to me, I'd still use Dirty because of it's easy no faffing about nature.

[quote author="ian"]
2. The new site has a VDP (very dirty person) system.
3. Lower prices on bulk orders.
[/quote]

As above, you should still be trying to make this profitable.  I seriously don't know how you make any money Ian, you seem to be perpetually running stuff "at cost" for the greater good.  You moved to China, doesn't mean you have to become communist ;-)

[quote author="ian"]
4. Increase shipping fees a bit.
[/quote]

I like that standard shipping is "free", of course it's built into the cost, but it makes it easy for my addled brain to work out amortized costs of a PCB when I can "ignore" shipping because it was "free". So in other words, the increase in cost for shipping should IMHO be rolled into the increased PCB cost.

[quote author="ian"]
5. Still not sure on this one, but it is an idea we're tossing around... An even cheaper board option
[/quote]

Personally, I think that's a bad idea for you, lots of headache for no reward.
14
DirtyPCBs support / Re: Gerbers in .txt format
[quote author="Robaroni"]Could you figure a way to accept our txt files so we can just submit them as we order two to three time a month.[/quote]

Err... why don't you just rename them?  As long as they are indeed gerber files that simply have a .txt file extension, just change the file extension before you zip them.  From the Dirty PCBs info, these are the extensions they are looking for (and what I rename my DipTrace generated gerbers to).

GTO   Top Silkscreen (text)
GTS   Top Soldermask (the 'green' stuff)
GTL   Top Copper (conducting layer)
GBL   Bottom Copper
GBS   Bottom Soldermask
GBO   Bottom Silkscreen
GML/GKO/GBR*   Board Outline*
TXT   Routing and Drill (the holes and slots)
*Required
15
DirtyPCBs support / Re: How do I panelize my PCBs? What kind of panelizing is ok
I'll add a shout-out here to STIJN KUIPERS Geber Panelizer Tool.  I have used it myself and it works pretty well in my opinion.  It's in "closed beta", just ask Stijn for the password to download it.

Since I'm here I'll include a couple of notes I sent Stijn about my experience using his tool which might be helpful for others...

Quote
(...) DipTrace users should export the following layers with the following names (they can set these as defaults in the gerber export for simplicity)...

Layer   Filename
Top Silk   <layer>.gto
Top Mask   <layer>.gts
Top   <layer>.gtl
Bottom   <layer>.gbl
Bottom Mask   <layer>.gbs
Bottom Silk   <layer>.gbo
Board Outline   <layer>.gko

Important to note that they should not create a "gml" file as specified in your help, this is mainly what got me confused, just the gko is sufficient.

I did not have good results when using Metric units in the Gerber (well, my gerber viewer got screwy)

They will also of course need to export the N/C Drill, which can be named Through.txt

[hr:][/hr:]

I usually use gerbv to check my gerbers[s:], for some reason gerbv segfaults when reading the copper and mask layers of your tool's combined output (it reads the outline and silk layers fine)[/s:] (see update below)

gerbview (part of kiCad) seems to work ok

mayhewlabs in-browser 3d viewer sort of works, but gets messed up on some of the copper and the internal cut-outs of the outline (maybe it just can't render those at all though)

[hr:][/hr:]

Fixing gerbv to work with Stijn's tool's merged gerbers

Short version, gerbv has a miniscule bug which messes things up trying to display the merged result.

I created a fork here to fix it, in so much as a one-line-change can be a fork:

  https://github.com/sleemanj/gerbv/blob/master/README.md

PS: Ian, it would be good for you to update the gerbv you use on dev.dang.... to be my "fork" above, that should fix the no-image-gets-generated problem on some of the boards, it's to do with polygons in gerbers that have more points than the gerbv developers thought one should need (a very low number).

[hr:][/hr:]

I think tabs "3 holes" across would have been sufficient (...) I need to use pliers to break the wider ones apart






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