Having trouble generating gcode with coppercam,
Have designed a circuit in kicad all looks good, except when I export the Gcode.
After exporting in to copper cam some on the tracks are showing as border and some pads appear empty,
Imported Gerber
Attempting to trace and nothing, it does not got all the way around the tracks and seems to ignore the pads, I don’t know where the issue is. Is it kicad output, did I do something wrong with my design I am completely lost.
The Errors
Could you post a screenshot of how the gerbers look in GerbView? It appears that second post is the view from PCBnew.
One thing that surprised me with importing gerber and nc files in the past is the different standards that are out there. Is it possible your program is expecting a different standard? Are you following any kind of guide? What about previous designs, have you ever imported any files successfully?
No this is the first time I have tried, I am just following a general copper cam guide its funny though because the pads for the amd usb plug works fine but the other smd pads don’t. Perhaps you have another suggestion for a CAM for isolation milling ?
Interesting observation, I tried and online pcb isolation router software and this time I was able to generate a route for the tracks but same as the copper cam photo those certain SMD pads still appear as just an outline empty in the middle. I suspect this has to be something with kicad.
Further update to this issue, After racking my brains what was different between the pads that where working and the ones that where not I figures it out. All the pads which show hollow are at a user defined angle. Swapped the pads to a predefined 90 degrees and sure enough they all show up in copper cam. I can only assume at this point it is a bug.
It would make sens to try to mill the board first, maybe the bug is only seen in software but the g-code is generated fine?
John - can you be more specific how you solved your Kikad to Copper Cam problem? I’m not sure what you mean by ‘swapped pads to be a predefined 90 degrees.’ Was this in Kikad or Copper Cam? And how…?
I recently made a post in the yahoo Kicad forum about a 2011 thread that questioned the standard that Kicad follows when outputting gerber files. Existing gerber to g-code converters for isolation routing at that time had a problem with Kicads gerber files. I asked for updates on this issue, but have not received a reply.
Does anyone have anything to add to this?
The interesting part in the referenced post starts at post #5
