I used an external gerber viewer for a bit, then stopped... trusting my=20 layout package to get it right. Soon after, a bug in Altium Designer's gerber export (which was quickly=20 fixed afterward) messed up the direction on arcs in certain situations. I got a shipment of PCBs where incorrect arcs on pad thermals shorted=20 almost everything on the board together. These were supposedly=20 electrically tested, too. While they were technically correct=20 productions from the given gerbers it must have raised some eyebrows. Lesson learned. I now check every single set of gerbers with an=20 external viewer. Darron Black Houston, TX On 03/27/2012 01:43 PM, Matt Bennett wrote: > On Tue, March 27, 2012 11:27 am, M.L. wrote: >> On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 10:22 AM, John Gardner wrote: >>> I'm new to the business of having PCBs made. >>> >>> Autotrax 1.61 -> CadCentric -> 274X Gerbers, which look OK >>> in a Gerber viewer (http://www.gerber-viewer.com/default.aspx.) >>> >>> Has anyone else done this, or similar, or have a better scheme? >>> >> >> Autotrax is incredibly old, but if that's what you want to use it should >> work. >> >> Anything will work as long as you verify that your resulting Gerber >> files are correct. >> >> I would recommend Cadsoft Eagle or a free software program that I >> can't remember at the moment. >> >> For viewing Gerber files I recommend "GerbV": >> http://gerbv.sourceforge.net/ > Honestly, I've found that looking at the Gerbers themselves haven't done > anything for me in the last few designs I've done (including some rather > large designs upwards of 6"x10", 4 layer). Maybe I trust in Eagle too > much, but I think the only thing I could see in a Gerber is a rather gros= s > error, and my experience has been that the Gerbers that Eagle (and with > less experience, Altium) put out are accurate to the layout program. > > Proper application of design rules and listening to the warnings that the > layout program gives me (don't forget online DRCs too- they have value!) > have turned out to be much more effective uses of my time. If I were to > switch to a program I had less experience with, maybe I'd run them throug= h > a Gerber viewer. But in the past 10 years, I don't remember a single time > that reviewing a Gerber would have given me something that I couldn't hav= e > picked up in the layout program. > > Of course, the above comments are with Gerbers that are 100% generated by > the layout program. Hand edit them, and all bets are off. > > I frequently get customers to ask me to review layouts, and gahh... I hat= e > it when someone sends me just a Gerber, since the Gerber doesn't have any > information about the net embedded- I feel like it is doing a code review > of a .hex file. Sure, it can be done, but with a lot of effort, and my > review is much more effective with the source files. Of course, a Gerber > is better than nothing, but constructive comments on a complex design > (with just Gerbers) are pretty difficult. > > Matt Bennett > Just outside of Austin, TX > 30.51,-97.91 > > The views I express are my own, not that of my employer, a large > multinational corporation that you are familiar with. --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .