One pad oriented incorrectly

May 07, 2016, 06:39:43 pm

Anyone have any ideas about what's going on here with this (not) rotated pad? Submitted this order through the new site. No render was provided during order process (just tried again and same thing). Center pad of QFN48 in the upper left of board is (not) rotated and this makes the board pretty worthless. Created in Diptrace (3.0 beta) and exported as Gerber. Diptrace's preview, as well as two other gerber viewers (one online, one in kicad) show correct orientation of that center pad.

[attachment=2] [attachment=1]

OSHPark fails to even render this design due to complex circular pads (for membrane switch) that dirty PCBs get exactly and beautifully right! Too bad this one pad makes it worthless. I don't need/want any compensation here (totally understand that this site is dirty and experimental). Just trying to learn how I can avoid this in the future. Is there anything in the gerber that would cause this?

I'll create a support ticket as well, but was hoping other users might have ideas.

-c

Re: One pad oriented incorrectly

Reply #1 – May 09, 2016, 12:21:34 am

In the gerber data, the pad is defined by an Aperture macro with polygon primitive:

Code: [Select]

%AMOUTLINE38*5,1,4,0,0,6.5054,-90.0*%

This should definitely be a 4-sided polygon that should look exactly like your design. The polygon is rotated by -90 deg, but it doesn't make any difference if it's 0,90 or -90 degrees. That means there is a serious bug in the processing of regular polygons in the software of the board house. You should avoid using the aperture macro with regular polygons. It shouldn't be too difficult to replace those macros by a macro with a normal polygon primitive in the gerber file.