First time doing anything PCB related. I am viewing my files in viewplot, but it shows the silkscreen on the pads, both on the bottom and top. Is this normal? Can someone take a look?
I attached the gerber files and the eagle board file, feed back would be appreciated .
DRC emailed me, and it does not look right, is it mirroring? If so, how do I fix it?
Looks OK to me: The DRC bot’s images match the Eagle board. BatchPCB requires layers to NOT be mirrored, so your design should work :).
Silkscreen is oftentimes placed over pads. This is not a problem, it just doesn’t show up on the finished boards. It’s used as reference on the computer.
I did not look at your gerbers, but it could be that your viewer is to blame. Probably bad practice on my part, but I just use the SparkFun CAM, zip, upload and submit for my designs and have had no problems so far.
Great. When I look at it in the viewer, the solder mask is only showing up on the pads, nothing else. I was wondering if it did that so you could see the other layers.
And I assume that the solder mask is not applied to wherever th silkscreen is?
I looked too; I used gerbv. Your br.gts and br.gbs files look like proper mask files to me. The files define where solder mask should not be. There was no problem with mirroring or a alignment that I could see.
You have these file:
br.GBL
br.GBO
br.GBS
br.GTL
br.GTO
br.GTS
br.TXT
I did not know if the allowed filename extensions were case-sensitive. Apparently not, if the bot handled them ok for you.
You have defined the board size and shape with an outline in the top copper – br.gtl file. OK.
Your bottom silk file, br.gbo, seems to be empty. Gerbv ignored it. So you would appear to have nothing to print on the bottom of your board. Your top silk, br.gto, does not have lettering. I would think you might want to add more to your silk layers. I would, at least add clear indications of where pin 1 is for each part where it matters. Adding stuff to the silk layers does not cost extra.
Myself, I would increase spacings where easy. Why have traces only 8 mils from pads when you have so much space to use? Those connectors with the staggered 75 mil circular pads… that does make it tight between pads. Maybe you could decrease the pad height a tad… Maybe use non-round pad.
Yet the spacings do appear to meet minimums as far as I saw. Your pads are 13 mils from the defined board edge.
No mirroring problems
Thanks for the comprehensive reply!
It took me a while to figure out which layer is the silkscreen, so I added it. I am going to redo the whole board, so I will redefine spacing.
Thanks!