Missing copper fill

Archive BatchPCB
1

Hi,

I received my board last week – took just over 3 weeks (to Canada), which I guess is reasonable considering the low price. This was my first time using BatchPCB.

The board looks good, except for one thing – the copper pour is missing on the bottom side.

I created the copper area as a filled polygon (I’m using Easy-PC 9), and enabled all three RS-274X options in the Easy-PC Gerber Setup: Include Aperture Table, Hardware Arcs, Hardware Fill. (The “Hardware Fill” option eliminates the gazillions of lines that stroke fill would otherwise have needed to fill the area.)

Well, the copper traces outlining the polygon are there, but the polygon is not filled with copper.

Luckily I had also drawn the connections with regular traces, so the circuit should still work. (Anyways, it’s just a prototype.)

I had checked the Gerber files with a viewer (ViewMate 9.2) and they looked OK. The screen shots the DRC Bot e-mailed me looked OK. But the board that came back was different.

Note that the top side of the board also has filled polygons, but these are filled with copper OK. So, it would seem that the software SparkFun/BatchPCB and Gold Phoenix are using does handle polygon area fill.

I wonder what happened?

Dave W.

2

Most likely the “Hardware Fill” option on the polygons got messed up or ignored entirely by the manufacturer’s gerber processing software.

I always turn off “Hardware Fill” and “Hardware Arcs” in gerber generation as it’s open to interpretation by the manufacturer’s software used to process the gerber files. Line draws are almost never mis-interpreted in RS-274X, since it embeds the apertures.

Yeah, drawing lots of lines for fills makes for large gerber files, but the files are just ASCII text and pack down nicely (zip) for transmitting to the manufacturer. Data storage is cheap, messed up PCBs aren’t.