Today I just saw the content of a file generated by Kicad, the .gbrjob. I had seen this file before but I didn’t know what it was for until today. I opened it and it has very important information for the manufacturer.
however, doing a quick search I noticed that there is only one interpreter for this format and it is the one provided by Ucamco, which is very good, however I am a linux user.
my question is, has someone made an interpreter for this file that tabulates the information in the way that Ucamco does, and above all with an option to print in an orderly way.
I am very far from fully understanding this. But it seems that X2 format with the .gbrjob file adds intelligence to the gerbers, so that the viewer can find R27 for example. No longer are the gerbers just a bunch of dumb images. The gerber viewer bit of KiCad can read this information.
I wanted to better read my board designs using my old Win XP lab computer. But that OS does not run KiCad 6 and Pentalogix Viewmate (my usual gerber viewer) was running on XP but could not properly read the .gbrjob file. I ended up partitioning the HDD and installing Linux Mint so that I could run KiCad on that lab computer.
But I also learned something more about Pentalogix Viewmate ability to view the gerber format. I will send to you by PM a .pdf of an e-mail exchange which I had with those guys. I am not sure but it might be helpful. The e-mail thread has e-mail addresses so I did not want to post it on the public forum. I ask that you also do not post it publicly although nothing there is personal.
this file is a simple JSON, it is a structured plain text file, if you want you can open it with a plain text editor and you will be able to see the structure, all the data of your PCB is organized there. what happens is that they are not presented in a friendly way
As I have told you, the gerber job contains important information from the manufacturer and only ucamco has a way to show it in a nice way, I made a simple script to be able to extract this information and save it in a CSV so that the manufacturer can see it in a nice way.
in the repository you can see the code and modify it if you want, the idea is to have something like this.
