Size bot problems

Archive BatchPCB
1

So I’ve added some addtional features such as leading/trailing zero detection and a much more efficient algorithm. But it’s still not good enough. A big board (10" sqr) with a ground pour kills it because we have a max of 30 processing script time on the current server. I’ll try to move the size processing to the DRC bot this week.

Please - if you submit your design and the size doesn’t come out correctly, as expected, please report it here. We are working on a case by case basis.

We need to know the name of your zip file, and what exactly the bot did/reported.

-Nathan

2

I’ve put in two board, both of which failed. They also both have ground planes, so this could certainly be the issue.

parthia

This is a 7" x 3" board with the bottom layer being almost completely a ground plane. This board hits the 30 second limit and fails.

piper

This is a 5" x 2" board, again with the bottom layer as a ground plane. This gets though the initial step, however the measurements are all wrong. This is what I get:

X Max: 0 X Min: 0

Y Max: 1.61 Y Min: 0

PCB Size: 0 inches square

Estimated price per board: $25000

I’m using OrCad and my Gerber settings are at 2.3. I pass OrCad’s DRC and FreeDFM’s DRC, so I think the designs themselves are pretty clean, though I realize they’re somewhat large and the ground plane causes problems. If I can be of any help, please let me know.

Thanks,

Dave

3

Can you send me your zip files so I can have a look at you files (spark at sparkfun.com)? There is no way to tell what is going on without looking at the innards. It’s probably a problem with the file settings detector which should be re-written today.

-Nathan

4

So this is why I enjoy beta testing so much. I never though anyone would design a board in the negative quadrant. Most of your gerber coordinates are negative. This is great, because some are and some aren’t, so it’s not as easy as dropping the negative sign.

The size script has been updated accordingly. You board size comes up perfectly. Please ram it through a couple more times and let me know if you have any more problems.

I’m off to write a drill file detector!

-Nathan

5

haha, that’s actually pretty funny. I assure you I didn’t do it just to stress out your system, but hey, I guess it’s good in that regards.

The board size is correctly calculated, but the 7"x3" board still hits the 30 second limit and dies.

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /home/.sites/133/site55/web/drc_function_layer.php on line 323

Thanks,

Dave

6

Hey.

I’m using Labcenter Proteus Ares to design my boards and having some interesting problems. First of all the size. No matter what I do BatchBot always tells me:

X Max: -100000 X Min: 100000

Y Max: -100000 Y Min: 100000

PCB Size: 40000000000 inches square

Estimated price per board: $25000

I have followed instructions that are on your faq as well as help files in Proteus. The strange thing is that I can actually define the output size before outputting to gerber!!

The gerbers pass the initial DRC check and then after the final step, where u email me the results of the DRC check it states:

PCB Size: 100 square inches

Estimated Price per Board: $250

it has magically shrunk, but not down to the 2" x 1" approx

On top of all this i have problems with the drill files, it seems proteus use some kind of non compliant drill file format. The size of the drills is actually placed into the read me file rather than in the drill file, the latter only contains coordinates. I looked up the format of excellon drill files and modified mine so that they appear correct to gerber viewers.

BTW, the zip file is called AllIn1.zip

Can anyone help? Does anyone have any experience of Proteus? I’d really like to get my FIRST EVER PCB made up!!

One last thing, could it have anything to do with leading 0 suppression?

Cheers,

Rob.

One this I have just noticed is that the pictures that are sent by email are representative of the size of the board, ie there is no excess space around the layout??

7

I know zip about proteus but I would bet its 2 things. Leading zero and number of digits to the right of the decimal point. Next time you submit, try selecting 5 digits to see what happens.

You should open up the gerbers and look at the numbers. It should be fairly obvious what the format is.

8

Philba:
I know zip about proteus but I would bet its 2 things. Leading zero and number of digits to the right of the decimal point. Next time you submit, try selecting 5 digits to see what happens.

You should open up the gerbers and look at the numbers. It should be fairly obvious what the format is.

Cheers Philba, I did so and got exactly the same result, although I was unable to find the 5 digit option. It seems that by the time you get to the point of declaring the gerber version and program etc it has already calculated the size of the board.

Anyway, I’ve opened up the gerbers and they look like this:

X+12500Y+4500D03*

X+12500Y+5500D03*

X+12500Y+6500D03*

So I assume it is leading zero suppression and the numbers are expressed as e-5 right? As for the format, the following line can be found in the readme file that proteus produces with every gerber output:

Format: RS274X, ASCII, 2.4, imperial, absolute, eob=*, LZO

Would anyone be able to post an ok gerber file to see if I can knock up a VB prog to modify mine to make them compliant. Or does anyone know the file spec of Gerber files. I found else where on this forum a link to them, some sourceforge project, but i was unable to find them on the site.

Regards,

Rob.

9

Sulley:
Cheers Philba, I did so and got exactly the same result, although I was unable to find the 5 digit option. It seems that by the time you get to the point of declaring the gerber version and program etc it has already calculated the size of the board.

sigh, yeah brain-fart. that’s for the drill file. sorry.

Sulley:
Anyway, I’ve opened up the gerbers and they look like this:

X+12500Y+4500D03*

X+12500Y+5500D03*

X+12500Y+6500D03*

So I assume it is leading zero suppression and the numbers are expressed as e-5 right? As for the format, the following line can be found in the readme file that proteus produces with every gerber output:

Format: RS274X, ASCII, 2.4, imperial, absolute, eob=*, LZO

Would anyone be able to post an ok gerber file to see if I can knock up a VB prog to modify mine to make them compliant. Or does anyone know the file spec of Gerber files. I found else where on this forum a link to them, some sourceforge project, but i was unable to find them on the site.

from what I can see, it does look like 5 digits. That would make your board 100X bigger, though so that doesn’t completely explain it. you could try lopping off the last digit and see what happens. I wonder if the + is confusing nathan’s size script.

Here’s the first little bit of one of mine that passed with correct size - eagle 4.15 output. 2.4, no leading zero supress.

G75*

G70*

%OFA0B0*%

%FSLAX24Y24*%

%IPPOS*%

%LPD*%

%AMOC8*

5,1,8,0,0,1.08239X$1,22.5*

%

%ADD10R,0.0709X0.0630*%

%ADD11R,0.0710X0.0630*%

… [appature def lines removed for clarity]

D10*

X006052Y011249D03*

X006052Y012351D03*

X018177Y011999D03*

X018177Y013101D03*

X019802Y013101D03*

X019802Y011999D03*

D11*

X010802Y008235D03*

X010802Y007115D03*

X010177Y004485D03*

X010177Y003365D03*

X011427Y003365D03*

X011427Y004485D03*

[a LOT of lines removed…]

10

Philba:
sigh, yeah brain-fart. that’s for the drill file. sorry.

Sulley:
Anyway, I’ve opened up the gerbers and they look like this:

X+12500Y+4500D03*

X+12500Y+5500D03*

X+12500Y+6500D03*

So I assume it is leading zero suppression and the numbers are expressed as e-5 right? As for the format, the following line can be found in the readme file that proteus produces with every gerber output:

Format: RS274X, ASCII, 2.4, imperial, absolute, eob=*, LZO

Would anyone be able to post an ok gerber file to see if I can knock up a VB prog to modify mine to make them compliant. Or does anyone know the file spec of Gerber files. I found else where on this forum a link to them, some sourceforge project, but i was unable to find them on the site.

from what I can see, it does look like 5 digits. That would make your board 100X bigger, though so that doesn’t completely explain it. you could try lopping off the last digit and see what happens. I wonder if the + is confusing nathan’s size script.

Here’s the first little bit of one of mine that passed with correct size - eagle 4.15 output. 2.4, no leading zero supress.

G75*

G70*

%OFA0B0*%

%FSLAX24Y24*%

%IPPOS*%

%LPD*%

%AMOC8*

5,1,8,0,0,1.08239X$1,22.5*

%

%ADD10R,0.0709X0.0630*%

%ADD11R,0.0710X0.0630*%

… [appature def lines removed for clarity]

D10*

X006052Y011249D03*

X006052Y012351D03*

X018177Y011999D03*

X018177Y013101D03*

X019802Y013101D03*

X019802Y011999D03*

D11*

X010802Y008235D03*

X010802Y007115D03*

X010177Y004485D03*

X010177Y003365D03*

X011427Y003365D03*

X011427Y004485D03*

[a LOT of lines removed…]

Wow, you have brainfarts in the US too!! Not just a UK thing then.

Right, I have modified my gerber files through a text editor (Crimson to be precise, freeware, can’t recommend it enough) so that there are no more + and there are 5 figures per x/y coordinate.

What happened…DAAAA DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR:

X Max: 1.3 X Min: 0.05

Y Max: 0.8 Y Min: 0

PCB Size: 1 inches square

Estimated price per board: $2.5

Amazing!

I’d definatly like to get the gerber file specs as there is a lot of stuff at the top of your gerbers that I don’t get. Here is the ‘header’ from one of mine:

G04 PROTEUS RS274X GERBER FILE*

%FSLAX24Y24*%

%MOIN*%

%ADD10C,0.0120*%

%ADD11C,0.0500*%

%ADD12R,0.0500X0.0500*%

%ADD13C,0.0100*%

%ADD14R,0.0800X0.0250*%

Although, my PCB is only a SMT to throughhole converter for 1xQFN16 and 2xSOIC8, so the extra bits on yours may be due to it being more complex.

Right, I think its about time I brush up on my VB skills, its been a while!

Cheers for your help Philba, its truly appriciated.

Rob.

11

Oh dear,

There is a saying about counting chickens isn’t there that i think applies now:

Thank you for submitting your design to BatchPCB!

Unfortunately the

automated DRC bot could not process your design “AllIn1Mod”. A human will look at it and get back to you with a resolution within 24 hours.

Feel free to submit additional designs at any time.

Thanks

again for using BatchPCB!

So all is not well.

Well someone is gonna get back to me, so I’ll have to wait and see! But it might just be the fact I only submitted the upper layers, it was quite dull rectifying the gerber problems by hand!!

Rob.

12

Here I thought we Americans INVENTED brain farts. It certainly explains a lot of foul smelling ideas around here but I’m more than happy to share with the rest of the world…

Hopefully Nathan is listening to this thread and could effect a modification to the scripts to handle your format.

On the other hand, maybe your software has a way to control the gerber output. You might also look into a processing script. perl or awk could do it. I’m sure there are others.

Sulley:
…

G04 PROTEUS RS274X GERBER FILE*

%FSLAX24Y24*%

%MOIN*%

%ADD10C,0.0120*%

%ADD11C,0.0500*%

%ADD12R,0.0500X0.0500*%

%ADD13C,0.0100*%

%ADD14R,0.0800X0.0250*%

the FS statement says you have no leading zeroes (L), absolute coords (A), X and Y are 2.4 (which looks different from the actual coordinates you you showed), MOIN says use inch units. AD is an aperture definition (C is circle, R - rectangle)

Check this doc for more info - http://gerbv.sourceforge.net/docs/rs274xrevd_e.pdf

Good luck

13

If only the cc fraud from Ghanna would stop, I’d have more time for coding. Grrr.

Philba and Sulley - Thanks so much for the help! Well, thanks for breaking things I guess. :twisted:

The problem is your + signs (you found this out). I have never seen that before. Another coding bug.

Gimme two seconds. K. It’s fixed, but I need your files to run them through a big. Please email them to me spark at sparkfun.com.

-Nathan

14

Hi

Did someone fix the thing with ares? I finished a design and got the gerber R42 X output and everything but it does not display the TXXCX.XXXX in the drill file so is there any way to fix this? I’ve been trying to figure out how to “translate” the DCodes from the README file to TCodes and insert them into the drill file but I cant understand.

Ares reports DCodes in thou(sands?) but TCodes seems like inches so how can I convert these sizes and then insert them into the drill file?

Also I sent my design like 12 hours ago and I havent received the DRC email. I checked my spam/bulk folder and it is not there. Any ideas?

thanks

15

Also I sent my design like 12 hours ago and I havent received the DRC email. I checked my spam/bulk folder and it is not there. Any ideas?

Does your ISP do SPAM filtering? I had the same problem (as have others) and it turned out that Comcast was doing spam filtering I didn't know about (in addition to the spam filtering of my mail client). Had to reconfigure my account to disable it and then it came through.
16

Yes, but I check in there very often (now b/c I need to know about the DRC email). Is there any possibility that maybe because my design isnt TOTALLY gerber format, the DRC checker just ignored my design? I’m thinking of uploading again the design after I find the thing w/the drill file. Also, I had some problems while I was uploading the file for the first time so maybe it didnt got uploaded at all.

Any ideas on the ares/gerber/tcode thing? I’d really apreciated an answer on that issue. Thanks

Note: I uploaded my design as MobilEye.zip (MB1 is the name)

17

I notice this is an old thread - but the topic is still valid:

Have the bugs been worked out of the system yet? Last I checked all my boards with 8 mil ground pours still couldn’t get past the bot. And yet - when checked with other tools they are fine. And yes I do not want to modify the size of the pour.

Until that gets fixed I’m sticking with Advanced PCB.

18

So is it better to change my software i.e. use another kind of PCB solution instead of Ares? If so, which one? b/c proteus has isis that can simulate the design and then generate the netlist and from there I can create my PCB layout so its like export a simulation to a PCB Layout in a few clicks. Do you know any software that can generate the R247X Gerber file as it should be AND can work in the same way than Proteus?

19

Never mind, I figured it out. Now im ready to send my new desing… Im thinking of creating a VB app to do the T code inserting in the drilling file…

20

I’ve ordered this board successfully from other board houses but the DRC at batchpcb reports the incorrect board size. The correct board size is 0.675" x 0.875". The DRC reports the following:

10 x BatchPCB Design : 10010 - 0.5871x0.7846" (BatchPCB.com) = $25.00

I do have a 0.6" round pad on the bottom side of the PCB as a contact for a coin cell holder. The DRD file clearly indicates the board outline. I’m not sure where to go from here. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Oh, using OrCAD Layout and ViewMaster to check Gerber files.

-Tom