Limitations in Carbide Copper?

1

I’m trying out my first PCB project but I’m having a rough time getting Carbide Copper to read my gerber and drill files correctly.

  1. In the Gerber copper layer it doesn’t show four custom shape pads
  2. It greatly misinterprets the board outline -possibly because it contains cutouts?
  3. It fails to recognize the drill file
  4. It doesn’t allow the origin to be anywhere else but in the lower left corner. Can be fixed, but a somewhat silly limitation
    Files are generated by Orcad PCB Designer 17.4. Gerber is in RS274x format, drill is in Excellon format (I have tried normal and enhance Excellon)
    If I check the gerber and nc drill files in Viewmate everything looks correct.
    Picture from Viewmate (mirrored):
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    image3051×514 14.2 KB
2

I was not allowed to add also a picture of Carbide copper in the same post, so here it comes:

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image1920×422 53 KB

3

I use http://flatcam.org/ instead of Copper. Works a lot better, and 100% on your machine.

1 Like
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image3024×4032 2.87 MB

5

Thanks for the tip! Do you know if it can handle panelization and soldermask as well?

6

It has a simple panelize capability. Not sure what you want with soldermask… You want to do that yourself?

7

I saw somewhere a tool that was capable of finishing all the solder pads after painting the board with solder mask. Could be neat sometimes when you need the isolation.

8

I had hopes for copper, but also started using flatcam. My needs are rare, though, and it’s so easy to just have the boards made that I don’t bother other than with simple prototypes. I use kicad or easyEDA and usually order from jlcpcb or similar.

9

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