I’ve sent 2 ZIPs in to Batch PCB’s DRC bot. On the preview screen, where you pick the function of each file, all of the traces on the bottom of my PCBs are shown just fine. After approval, in the PNGs attached to the bot’s email, I only see one or two traces.
I know the gerber output is good. I’m generating these from the same Altium Summer 08 package that I make my living with every day.
I just want to make sure that the gerber data is being properly understood, and that the bot’s pictures are the problem, not anything else.
The website previews match the PNGs in the emails.
I send gerbers generated with this package to other board houses weekly without issues. No one has ever complained about the output, in the US or China or Singapore or Germany or Brazil. I’m at a loss.
Sent the package to support, along with the email, the PNGs, and all the supporting documentation I could think of. Hopefully someone on the back end can tell me what’s going wrong.
Support has been fabulous, digging into the bowels of this thing with me. Looks like the bot can’t deal with some Gerber stacks that have complex bottom layers. The images generated only show a small subset of the bottom layer. My Gerber tools are conflited though, with Camtastic showing the file as designed, and GC-Perview showing it as the bot does.
The bottom layer isn’t terribly complex for me, but does contain a fair number of polygons compared to the standard back side pour. The project in question though is less complex than some others on BatchPCB, which is why I’m still working with support to figure out why it’s failing. Oddly enough, the output of the bot looks like this, and GC-Preview agrees:
The package I use is Altium Designer (summer 08 release), a high level industrial grade ECAD package used for serious design work. I push out hundreds of boards a year to board houses without any issues at all, so I know the files are good. I’m just trying to figure out why some of the most common reference tools can’t interpret the files correctly.
Its likely that some stuff is drawn using negatives - aka, the whole area is drawn positive, then negative areas are drawn on top, which should be erased. Then on top of those negative areas, the traces are drawn. Its telling that the only traces that are visible are the ones that touch the outer edge.
Last I was there, the bot didn’t support this, nor used a model that made supporting that easy [my fault, really].
Same problem here. I use Altium and it is probably the polygon pour that causes problem. I have sent an email to support along with a picture of the layer from Altium. Unfortunately it is the Easter holiday so don’t think I will get an answer until tuesday.
