Drill Holes Wrong Size

Greetings,

I have two projects back from BatchPCB - both have problems with drilled hole sizes. I’m a EAGLE user and have made several boards through commercial board houses.

All holes are drilled and plated and in the correct XY co-ords. The smallest holes (0.020) are the correct size but the larger ones are not. The largest hole size is 0.180, other sizes range from 0.020 to 0.150 (total of eight tools).

Twenty mil (0.020in) is listed as the smallest hole allowed by BatchPCB, and in one project I had used 10mil holes and these were drilled out to 0.020 which worked well in that design.

In each case a DRD, DRI, and DRL file was generated by EAGLE, zipped with Gerber layers (CMP, PLC,PLS,SOL,STC,STS), and uploaded. They passed the DRC bot.

I’ve asked Matt for help by email today. I’m wondering if anyone here has a similar issue or suggestions to solve mine?

Thanks In Advance!

Peter

bigglez:
Greetings,

I have two projects back from BatchPCB - both have problems with drilled hole sizes. I’m a EAGLE user and have made several boards through commercial board houses.

Greetings,

I’ve solved the problem - it’s an old and ugly one for projects with EAGLE and BatchPCB.

In summary, older revisions of EAGLE produce three drill data files:

drd Excellon Drill Data

dri Drill Station Information

drl Drill Tool Sizes

BatchPCB expects one combination drill file called DRD, with both drill sizes and Excellon data.

I’ve upgraded to EAGLE 4.16R1 and it produces the desired combo file (or older style multi files if desired).

Much of this was in the forum and FAQ and thanks to Matt for emailing help. The step by step instruction will give the right results in the latest EAGLE version (but not in earlier ones). QED.

As it’s Friday, and we need a bit of a laugh, try this one. I refreshed an old browser window a few minutes ago and got this data from BatchPCB:

X Max: -100000 X Min: 100000

Y Max: -100000 Y Min: 100000

PCB Size: 40000000000 inches square

Estimated price per board: $25000

Isn’t that about the floor area of a home (1388 sq ft)?

Comments Welcome!

Peter

hah, i think someone would pay to see a 1388 square foot PCB that is being used (IE, not just the PCB…)