Well, I’m seemingly at the last hurdle. Everything looks good in the gerber viewer and so forth.
My board is only about 1"x1", so I want to have multiples on the same PCB. I think my problem might have arisen because I smashed everything in order to get the silkscreen off of the traces?
When I Group, Copy, CTRL right click, and then try to drag the artwork over to a new spot to be copied, I get the Can’t backannotate this operation. Please do this in the schematic.
any ideas?
You made a good argument for using gerbmerge, so I’m going to try and use that. There is no way that I want it renaming my parts. the lettering is only 10mils high, but I should be able to see it under the scope when I’m assembling the board.
10 mils high lettering. That’s 1/100 of an inch. Given that printing is often 72 DPI, I suspect you will see nothing other that a few dots of paint, even with 100X magnification…
Great reasoning. Oh well, I could have made a lot of them quite a bit larger on some, but not all parts. I guess I’ll be assembling from a cheat sheet like I usually do. This will be my first board with silkscreen.
While were on the topic of gerbmerge…
Would it allow me to combine more than 2 designs at once? Or will I have keep merging each additional design to a master?
If you set up the input files right, you can merge as many designs and repeat them as many times as you want. I use gerbmerge to panelize my boards that I send to GP now, and it works really well. It’s a pain to get set up, though.
It’s actually pretty flexible. You can define how the different gerbers are placed with a very simple layout file.