I am dipping a toe into the SMT assembly waters with JLCPCB’s service. Attached are a PCBNew file for a board with a single SMT part and the .pos file I generated from File->Fab->Footprint Position.
Comparing the top-pos.csv with the PCB layout, it looks mostly right and fairly simple: the only discrepancy is that the Y coordinate is negative in the .csv. (I can sort of see that, the orientation of the Y axis in PCBNew has always seemed unnatural to me, but whatever, I can deal.)
Having uploaded the job to JLC, I can see (in “DFM analysis”) where they have the part jammed into the lower right corner of the board with the rotation off by 90 (or 270 degrees). They repositioned it correctly.
I included another more ambitious board in the same job, with 3 ICs and a couple dozen smaller parts. The resistors, diodes, transistors all got placed perfectly. So did the ICs, but their rotation was off 90 degrees. (These three errors also got corrected.) I’ve not included those files here so we can focus on the simpler case.
I’ve asked JLC about it and want to raise it here so as to be sure I’m generating the files properly.
Is there some way to graphically view the instructions of the footprint position file? It seems like this would be a natural feature for the Gerber viewer but the only thing I could think of was to include the pos.csv in the .zip file and GerbView flagged it as unrecognizable.
Comments on the board design in general are also welcome. It’s a (bipolar) control voltage display for use in modular analog synths so there should be nothing at all finicky about the signal paths.
CVMeter-top-pos.csv (114 Bytes) CVMeter.kicad_pcb (280.7 KB)
“Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide.”