I managed to get something through, but don’t know how I did it.
I have several cam files I’ve found scattered across google searches, I don’t know quite what they produce, they might be producing too little or too much information or layers. I may be wasting a lot of money on what will be useless boards.
I’m using Cadsoft Eagle, but many of the cam files generate uppercase extensions (i.e. .TXT not .txt), and the upload error screen just says “I don’t like your zip”, not which files were wrong.
The tutorials and howtos are mostly useless or confusing. “Click “Open” → “Job” and select the SFE cam file (or your own)”. Where is the SFE cam file? They tell me how to create random gerbers manually, but they don’t quite close the loop. I know how to layout the board, but there seem to be a lot of subtleties required (or will cause a lot of grief if not followed). I suspect for a 4 layer board I should use layers 2 and 3 (and nothing on 4-15). A list of tips would be helpful, but for now I’m doing 2 layer. I think I could figure them out but a guide would be helpful. I could go backwards from an official CAM file as it would tell me where it expects things.
It would help if there was at least for Cadsoft Eagle a precise “This is how you layout the board, here are the layers that will matter and what they do, and this is our official .cam file so if you follow the instructions and run it, it will create (only) the right files with the right extensions, ready to zip and submit”. Somewhere prominent on the BatchPCB site. I couldn’t find a link anywhere near “Run the CAM” sections in the tutorials.
Even simple things - It accepts top and bottom stencil extensions - does it use them? Can I get stencils? Or does it accept them simply to keep all the gerbers together for one job?
I can view the board in 3D - and he has a CAM file to use, so it was just running his cam processor script and drag and drop all the generated files here (Chrome browser is easiest):
http://mayhewlabs.com/webGerber (Main site: http://mayhewlabs.com/3dpcb)
It listed what it was going to do with the gerbers - some were ignored.
Why is that so easy and BatchPCB so frustratingly hard? And it might be only that I don’t have an official, blessed, or otherwise proper CAM processing file. But I have no idea what a good one would look like.
I do know what I am doing. Over a decade ago I was using “bae” (the forerunner) to generate gerbers, then an awk script I wrote (yes, awk) to generate a PDF (with options for mirroring) from the gerbers, and used an epson printer with transparency media and did the etching myself on surface mount. I know the process and what these things are. (I won’t go back to describe the red and blue tape era…).
I know that I will figure this all out, but it might get time consuming and expensive to do so. All the tribal knowledge within sparkfun doesn’t help someone trying to use it the first time.