How to create board outline and component placement from DXF?

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Hi there,

I’m trying to create a board outline for the Phoenix Contact Raspberry Pi case, the RPI-BC, but this is more of a generic flow question. I have access to the DXF here.

For a board outline I’m assuming I should just import the DXF and remove the lines that I don’t want to keep. But what’s the flow for placing connectors at the locations defined in the DXF? Is that just a manual step? For example, I want to create a template with the Raspberry Pi GPIO header and the 4 Phoenix Contact 4-pin headers in the correct place, do I create a schematic, create the layout and then just overlay the footprint over the relevant DXF artwork? Or is there a more automated/numerical way?

Oh, and this is version 5.

Thanks.

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Usually overlaying, with a checkup if you got some dimensioned drawing with center coordinate dimensions…
If you got access to dimensions of center points (relative to which centers is the question then) you can place components via coordinate input or via coordinate readout even.
Otherwise the grid is you friend.

Automated placements involve scripted boards for clocks or other things, where one got geometrical layouts.

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An alternative is the use of stepup. The newest version can update part positions from within freecad. More details see:

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