hi im attempting to take something i designed in ‘front panel designer’ and create gerber files in order to take advantage of jlcpcb’s great prices… my design is a 2 layer faceplate that i will end up gluing together. there are no traces or soldering pads etc, only holes for various bits ill be attaching myself. jlcpcb offer aluminum substrate panels which are just perfect for my needs and very affordable in contrast to cnc made panels.
so, ive managed to import the dxf file to the ‘edge cut’ layer and the lines seem to be accurate and theyre not grouped. they show up in gerber viewers but are not interpreted by jlcpcb as cuts apart from the outline, ie none of the holes seem to trigger a cut in their gerber inspection, so ill likely get a solid panel back from them if i order.
how do i make all lines imported into actual cuts to the panel when manufactured? ill need to export as gerber of course.
I have never used jlcpcb.
If they are in gerber viewers but not seen by jlcpcb that suggest jlcpcb problem.
You can replace lines with hole footprints and see how then.
to be clear, i can see the lines in my gerber viewer output, but the 3d viewer in kicad doesnt show open spaces where there should be, ie inside circular shapes intended to indicate a hole. so its a lot of work to recreate these items and im also using complex shapes not easily recreated in kicad (that i know of) otherwise i would just create these in kicad, and although thats my goal, i need these panels sooner than i will be able to do that.
so i dont know where the issue is. when my user drawing was on the ‘user drawing’ layer, i could see it in the jlcpcb viewer, but there didnt seem to be cutouts, it still looked like a solid panel with line graphics. so now the imported lines are in the edge cuts layer, should they appear as cutouts in kicad 3d viewer? do lines existing in that layer indicate cut should be made?
youre saying i should test a hole i create in kicad in place of one that i imported? ill do that thanks for the hint
edit: i put a circular shape in the PCB editor within the imported item’s area, saved and viewed with the 3d viewer. there was no cutout displayed. so does the edge cut layer include cuts within or on the edge of the working area? or do shapes and holes need to exist on another layer?
I have opening made by edge cuts layer and they are shown in KiCad (V 8.0.8) 3D viewer.
In my case they came from footprint but I remember in other PCB (probably KiCad V5) I was doing opening manually and they were shown in 3D view.
I don’t know.
I remember reading (when KiCad was V4 or V5) that minimal distance between line ends are tolerated, but later I sow information that ends must be perfectly one on another. In my example I used round values (90, 180 degree arcs) so ends were one on another.
The lines cannot overlap, they have to end - start at the same point, meaning where one ends the next must start.
Also, some imports, I’ve had it with DXF, import two sets of lines, one on top of the other, if you have that then your shapes are not closed, if you have that you will need to delete the duplicate lines.
Post your zipped Project and I’ll take a quick look, might be able to see what is wrong and set you on the right path . . .
everything worked fine, irregular shapes imported well and i just needed to delete the + symbols. i have yet to receive my order from jlcpcb but that should happen in about a week.
