Quote:
Originally Posted by julie_m
Quote:
Originally Posted by Slothie
How hard was it to write the code to output the Gerbers? I was thinking of a project to create Gerbers from photos or scans of PCBs but was scared a bit by the Gerbers bit.
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Very easy for this but probably not for what you want to do, because it's a vector format. The photoplotter projects an image of a selected aperture onto light-sensitive film. You can either flash the light on and off again to create a pad, or draw lines by moving with the light on. But it does not lend itself at all well to rasterised images!
There will be a disc image to play with once I have put together a few more component footprints (and maybe an improved tool for creating them). |
[a bit offtopic but...]
Hmm well my (very underdeveloped) plan was to have a screen in which you could size/reshape the image to correct keystoning and make it rectangular and to scale, then have tools to "draw" the lines/pads etc using the image as a background guide, possibly even using some "AI" to automate this process to some degree, so although the "input" is a raster image the output would be vectors. The "use case" was to make Gerbers/drilling files for the sort of PCB layouts in the back of ETI or Elektor or from photos of actual PCBs (in this case there would be an amount of guesswork where tracks go behind components!). I looked around and really couldn't find anything like this.