Sloted holes in KICAD 5.1.6

[JSt]

Hi to all,
i designed a footprint for an ACS758 / ACS781 Combo with sloted holes for the ACS758 using the KiCADStepUpTools. In KICAD it works fine, the 3D-Viever shows the sloted holes:

After ploting for PCB production the sloted holes are only shown as drills:

No Info in the other Gerber-Files regarding the sloted holes.

Any idea what i’m doing wrong?

Best regards
Juergen

[Rene_Poschl]

Not every gerber viewer supports the command used to make slots.

[JSt]

… but the produced PCBs from DirtyPCBs also have the two drills and no sloted hole

Juergen

[eelik]

What do you have here?

[eelik]

And, BTW, what’s your KiCad version?

You can zip and drag an example project here where you have plotted the footprint and which shows the problem.

[JSt]

… here the Version Info:

Application: KiCad
Version: (5.1.6)-1, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.4
libcurl/7.66.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1d (Schannel) zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.21.0 (+libidn2/2.1.1) nghttp2/1.39.2
Platform: Windows 8 (build 9200), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW

I used the recommend drill mode. When i use the alternate drill mode no holes (for the sloted holes) are generated:

Here the ZIP of the Test-Project:
Test.zip (18.9 KB)

[maui]

which gerber viewer are you using?
I have no issue (I generated two files for PTH and NPTH drills)

[eelik]

Same here, I just opened the drill files from the project and GerbView shows them fine.

It looks like the manufacturer has old CAM software or something and can’t interpret slots.

But DirtyPCBs isn’t even a manufacturer. Here’s a quote from their website:

Readme.txt & special instructions

Get the hell out of here. We are an automated conduit to cheap local Chinese fabs. We don’t read squat, and at these prices you’d be insane to think we do! Nobody at the board house even speaks English! You need a much more expensive board house if you need this level of service.

I would just change your “manufacturer” and order directly from some manufacturer. Most of them can make slots, even the cheap ones.

[JSt]

… i used the viewer from here https://github.com/ThisIsNotRocketScience/GerberTools because i used the panalizer from this project.

The PANALIZER is the Problem !!! The files before panalizing are ok.

Thanks for your support

Juergen

[kenyapcomau]

Try a different paneliser, like KiKit. That GerberTools paneliser is a nightmare because it’s written in C# (worse than Java for obfuscated error messages) and I never got any version later than 2017 to work with Mono on Linux.

[JSt]

Thanks for the hint. I will take a look on KiKat

[kenyapcomau]

KiKit, it’s a small KiKat.

[JSt]

… you are of course right

I used an older Version of the PANALIZER and VIEWER. After loading the latest release 20-9-2019 from https://github.com/ThisIsNotRocketScience/GerberTools/releases it looks ok with the alternate drill mode: