I finished laying out my first board in Eagle last night, and I’m going to send the gerbers off to DFRobot tonight. I have run the DFRobot design rules check and don’t get any errors/warnings.
The DFRobot tutorial on exporting for their manufacturing isn’t clear to me on something though… they say “The job (gerb274x) of processor will just export Dimension,tPlace and tNames layer in your design. And it also wont export the bottom layer silk screen also. So you need to print the tValues layer and the bottom layer silk screen”
Well, I’m not concerned with a bottom layer silkscreen… but I would like to have some of the other silk screen layers like 51 tDocu printed. I’m assuming all I do is highlight the layers I want in the Cam Processor Sil screen CMP (menu seen in attachment);
Seems obvious, but I just wanted to check with people that have experience. And are there any other potential pitfalls I should be looking out for?
Due to a rare power outage, I wasn’t able to work on this last night. I used the CAM file from Justin to export everything (plus layer 51 tDocu in the Silk Screen CMP tab).
Then running CAM350 in demo mode, I used the auto import function and am having some problems. After clicking Finish on Auto Import, I get a warning saying there is an aperature size of 0, and it seems that the drill dots are scaled much bigger than everything else.
Cool thanks again. And just to beg your help one more time, any thoughts on the aperture size warning? I’ve been doing some searching and so far the explanations sounded like it’s not a problem…
Found this on a different forum:
“The board outline may be of zero width. But many component’s silkscreen
are under 8 mil width and need to be adjusted by fixing the components
an after the fact ULP.”
Alrighty. Order is placed, design files are sent. You mentioned before telling Lauren you sent me… I’m assuming she receives the manufacturing emails so I wrote up a little note in the email.
It’s my second PCB layout, first in eagle, and most complex yet… let’s hope it works!
When I ordered my first pcb from dfrobot a few weeks ago, I had the same issue with the expanded drilling holes. So I looked for another gerber viewer and found that one: http://mayhewlabs.com/webGerber/
It worked great for me, hope it helps someone too!
Sweet. I was less than impressed with CAM350, so I’ll be sure to check out those alternatives.
In other news, I did get a reply back from Lauren last night that my files had been checked and were going to manufacturing.
Being the not so patient person I am, I paid the extra 20 for 3 business day service… I also got the black color and full E-test. Under $70 for 10 PCBs is still a pretty nice deal!