Hello. I’d like to create pcb’s by lasering away the area’s where copper has to be removed. The ouput option negative does that job very nicely. There is also a edge cut line, also great. But, before negating, outside the edge cut line there was nothing, so now there is. Until some margin. I have not found a way to reduce that margin to the cutline or somehow indicate to limit the negation to the area inside the edge cut line. Is there anything I overlooked? Thought the margin layer might do that, but it does not. Does anyone have an idea to fix this inside Kicad?
Not enough information for us to work with there pal…
What do you do?
Also, there are people who do what you want to do.
Try a search on the forum or google about the laser etching.
My problem was easily solved. Instead of printing from pcbnew, export to gerbers and use the gerber viewer to print it. Let’s you reverse it even.
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Hello Joan_Sparky and Torby, Let me try to clarify this a bit better. Imagine a donut, that I want to process the same way. That means I do not want to laser the donut, but the inverse shape, so that means the center bit and the outer bit. The outer bit is the area we should discuss. If there would be no limit of some sort, the outer would be infinite large to machine. Luckily there is a limit, it is some kind of margin defined - I would like to limit this margin to not go beyond the edgeCut line (which is created by Kicad all right). Gerber export and print from there is not an option because I do not want to print something, I want the ps or pdf file to send to my lasermachine.Hope this explains better. PS. there are threads out there that use this method to laser, but as far as I have seen, they all use cut mode - that means they laser around a line all right - but that method cannot burn away (varnish) on an AREA (like the inside of the donut).