Strange circles in the gerber

Layout Gerbers (GerbView)
21

Well, here it is and ready to light off.

Only once have I made a board that could not be made to work

800×558 102 KB

I fixed the footprint footprint. The two vertical lines were in the image file I made the footprint from.

22

So far so good. It runs programs and twiddles bits.

RF section works.

And the motor controller works! This board’s good.

23

Oh man, I had this problem with a board recently but thought they drew the circles to indicate something and it kept going back and forth with me saying “I don’t see anything wrong in the picture”. They ended up fabbing the boards without silkscreen :confused: .

Will make sure to set the output to 4.5 next time, thanks for this post and the responses!

24

I often dive in and ask what may be a dumb question figuring if I stumbled over it, others have too.

25

I know this is very old but in case people have future issues with this weird circle, my problem was that my lines weren’t perfectly connected. I uploaded a DXF file for the edge cuts of my board (weird shape, not your typical rectangle) and I realized that in autocad, my lines weren’t perfectly. connected. After fixing that, the circle went away. Hope this helps.

26

I know this thread is old, but I had this exact issue now when ordering things from allpcb.com (one of those Chinese manufacturers) and I want to record my experience in case anyone else has the same problem in the future. They told me the the gerber files looked like this:

image

But looking through all the files with 3 different gerber viewer programs showed NO PROBLEM.
Thus I conclude that their gerber reading program is the issue.

After reading this thread I changed two things:

  • Use auxiliary axis as origin = TRUE (making origo in the middle of the board instead of away in the distance towards the upper left)
  • Changed gerber file format from 4.6 to 4.5 (decreasing the numeric resolution of the placements)

The PCB manufacturing house replied that the result looks OK now.
Good luck!

2 Likes
27

Glad my old topic was helpful. I get nice quality from my disreputable Chinese board house (elecfreaks.com), but I have to use format 4.5.