Mail Archives: geda-user/2015/05/11/19:22:08
Hi All,
Had an interesting day playing with manual SMD placement. In this case,
I was working from Gerber data, and not gEDA files, so did not have
particularly good tools to help figure out what parts to place next.. or
where exactly R223 is, on a board where most of the components have poor
silk-screen legibility due to vias etc..
SO, I spent a couple of hours bashing out some proof of concept (get me
working ASAP) code that extends gerbv to manage lists of parts for
placement. The results were very gratifying, and I think it is worth
cleaning this feature up to make it more polished.
As gerbv already understands PCB's XY files, I munged the SMT placement
data I had (from OrCAD) into that format, and loaded the result into
gerbv. From this point, I populated a 3-layer deep tree-view grouped by
"footprint -> value -> refdes", and displayed this in a tab in the
left-hand side-bar of gerbv.
The basic functionality is then:
"select component in list" -> Crosshair indicates its position on top of
any gerber files loaded.
"double click", or press "enter" on a component (or group tree item), it
is struck through to indicate I've placed it.
I'm planning (with time), to extend functionality to allow saving out of
the placed/unplaced status, and perhaps adding comments fields to
document the "stuffed 100K || 100K in place of called out 50k" etc...
With the initial kludge code, my SMT placement productivity jumped from
~0, to fairly high.
Anyone else think this might be useful to them...
Anyone already have a better solution?
FWIW, I also wrote some simple kludge "need it now" code, to spit out
info to drive a CNC solder-paste dispenser based upon a solder-mask
gerber layer.
I'm considering adding a tool in gerbv to read/write these files
directly (current code is just a hacked together exporter for the
RS274-X gerber layer).
To do this properly would need a tool adding to allow defining of the
fiducual positions required to train its X-Y axis offsets and
calibrations and place paste accurately. (Initial data for paste
placement would be converted from the solderpaste layer, as I did in my
hack).
Kind regards,
--
Peter Clifton <peter DOT clifton AT clifton-electronics DOT co DOT uk>
Clifton Electronics
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