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Date:	Tue, 12 May 2015 17:44:46 -0800
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Subject:	Re: [geda-user] Using gerbv for assisting manual placement tasks
From:	"Britton Kerin (britton DOT kerin AT gmail DOT com)" <geda-user AT delorie DOT com>
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On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 3:21 PM, Peter Clifton <pcjc2 AT cam DOT ac DOT uk> wrote:
> 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...

Probably.  It sounds similar to what I currently do when assembling
prototypes, which involves a scripts that produces a parts list geared
towards assembly, which gets printed out.  The weak point in my
approach is that when refdeses overlap its dicey figuring out where
the parts are supposed to go, and it sounds like your setup solves
that.

> Anyone already have a better solution?

Not me anyway.  You imply above that if it had been a gEDA
board, you'd have had a better way to do it already.  I'm curious
what that way is, besides poking at PCB to make the refdes
visible, and removing the part from a cross-indexed list (or
come to think I guess you could just delete it from a copy of
the layout).

As usual with gEDA the trouble would probably be knowing
the functionality was available.

Britton

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