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Date:	Wed, 15 Jan 2014 12:10:02 +1300
From:	Lilith Bryant <dark141 AT gmail DOT com>
Subject:	Re: [geda-user] New router pictures
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	gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu on Tue Jan 14 16:31:30 2014)
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On 2014-01-14 04:31:30 PM, gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, 13 Jan 2014, Stefan Salewski wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2014-01-13 at 15:57 -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
> >> On 01/13/2014 11:55 AM, Stefan Salewski wrote:
> >>> I think you are one of the persons who have really used PCB program in
> >>> the last 4 years (I did not, maybe DJ did) -- have you ever noticed the
> >>> polygon bug reported some days ago by Gabriel Paubert? There seems to be
> >>> no reply from other people, so my impression that no one is using PCB
> >>> currently is supported unfortunately. I myself have no idea about
> >>> polygon handling and gerber generation, it was my assumption that that
> >>> was working correctly. Yesterday I found a problem report related to
> >>> polygon dicer from 2008
> >>> http://t14292.cad-geda-development.cadtalk.us/yet-another-dicer-bug-t14292.html
> >>
> >>   I've gotta jump in on this topic.  I've produced about thirty
> >> commercial boards in the past 2.5 years with PCB, nearly all of which
> >> have at least a few QFPs on them.  I have not, at least to my knowledge,
> >> run into this bug.
> >>
> >>                -Dave
> >>
> >
> > Good to hear that a few people are still using PCB, some even for
> > commercial boards. Personally I do not really care about if someone ever
> > may use my router, but as the project is on my homepage, someone may ask
> > me: Why do you work on a router for a program that absolutely no one is
> > using any more. Now I can point that people to this thread ;-)

I the past year I have done a couple of boards commercially including an
8-layer iMX6/DDR3/FPGA board (all BGA).   

The experience has been mostly positive but I have had a few issues 
with the gerbers/xy:

1) There's a bug in the circle generation code that causes small unreported 
clearance violations, that my PCB maker kicked back to me.  Reported here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/pcb/+bug/1100620

2) My PCB maker also moaned about below minimum feature widths in the 
polygons.  I have manually edited my boards to get around this.   I suspect they 
could have run a pass over it to fix it themselves, but whatever.    

3) The XY file generation was entirely broken when it came to BGAs/PGAs.  
This has been fixed/committed now.   They also had NO idea what to do with an 
".xy" file, so I hacked up a script to turn it into the same format that Proteus
outputs, which they happily accepted.

4) Have seen an issue where roughly half of a polygon isn't rendered.  This one 
went away when I changed the circle division to 12 (from 40) in my local version.  
Probably a degenerate numerical issue.   Will chase more when I have time.

I too really appreciate the scriptability of geda/pcb.   Though admittedly mostly I
use that to get around the general clunkiness of the workflow and/or oddities 
(e.g. gschem's annoying insistence that you put a ":1" suffix on "net" labels)

Lilith

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