Don’t know anything about Proteus, but I guess they make a drill rack file where all the sizes are listed and you need to supply this file along with your drill file and gerbers if you want to have your board fabricated.
The Pulsonix software I use has an option for including drill sizes in the Excellon drill file, Ares probably has something similar that you need to enable. Here is a file I generated for one of my boards:
I’ve had a look in ares and I can’t find anything, there are not many properties to change on the cad/cam exports page, just select the layers you want and enter a filename…
Interestingly enough batchpcb does seem to recognise some of the drill file, it gives me a preview of my board with the drills, but about half the holes are missing?
Yeah, I think it’s just batchpcb’s rather strict requirements that are causing the bother. Most fab houses are happy to play around with formats I’ve found (providing you’re ordering a thousand boards ;)) but batchpcb being low budget is a lot stricter in the formats they take to keep the orders efficient.
we’l get there! After laying out the pcb’s twice I just don’t want to have to go through it all again :twisted:
leon_heller:
The Pulsonix software I use has an option for including drill sizes in the Excellon drill file, Ares probably has something similar that you need to enable. Here is a file I generated for one of my boards:
The drill sizes are at the beginning of the file.
I agree with Leon. Producing a file like he posted should be the default option. It has been that way with every PCB layout package I've ever used. There has got to be an option somewhere.
I’m a little confused by this, I don’t know if any of you have used batchpcb, but when you upload the gerber files it gives you a little preview.
Without the drill sizes, the preview still placed the drill hits where there should be, and seemingly in the right size. But there were some drill hits missing.
Now batchpcb explicitly say they do not support drill files without the sizing, which is what had me a bit worried…
Anyway I think i’ve managed to manually translate the sizes into the header…suddenly in the preview all the drill hits have appeared so I seem to be getting somewhere…
Impression I’m getting is that batchpcb can read the drill file, but perhaps doesn’t have the best support for the slightly different way ares handles it?
Sorry, I can’t see how to do this in Proteus either. I’ve previously sent outputs from Ares to Olimex & didn’t have a problem, so I guess they must have manually extracted the drill size info from the Readme file. You could manually add the info if you wanted - just make sure you follow the NC Drill format.
This is weird, since Proteus Help even says:
“ARES handles this in the same way as it handles each Gerber D-Code - it assigns a new T-Code for each new hole size it encounters, and this information is also put in the tool information file.”
The modifications I made to the file worked guys (so problem solved!)
This is weird, since Proteus Help even says:
“ARES handles this in the same way as it handles each Gerber D-Code - it assigns a new T-Code for each new hole size it encounters, and this information is also put in the tool information file.”
It is weird - but if you look in the ‘readme’ file that is exported alongside the gerber files you will find the tool sizes in (ares own) format. Turns out it’s fairly easy to convert them into the drill file manually
