Welcome to the CADSTARguys Blog - Information, hints, tips and my waffle on the CADSTAR Printed Circuit Board design suite.

Please note that all names used are completely fictitious and any thing written is my own personal opinion or knowledge and not related in any way to either my employers or their customers (or Zuken).
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Thursday 3 September 2015

My Gerber files do not line up with my drill files?

This is something that I see and get asked about often, eyes light up when I tell them how to fix this.

What happens is that a user will produce Gerber and drill files centered in the bed in the scale & position dialogue and when they are imported into a Gerber viewer i.e. GC-Prevue the drill files are offset from the Gerbers.

This is not really a big problem as they can easily be aligned, but is would be nice if they simply lined up correctly - and they can so how?

It's easy really, just make a change to the .usr files that you use.

Within the RS274-X.USR and Excellon2.USR files there are XHIGH and YHIGH values that by default are different - I assume that this is because the photoplotter machine had a different bed size to the NC drill machine.

Simply edit the files in Notepad to read the same I.e. 24000 in both files - this gives you a 2' square bed. Or if Metric - try 500 for both.

Then your drills will line up.

2 comments:

anu said...

whether Both X and Y should be 24000?

MattyLad said...

Yes.
An no.

Yes if keeping the imperial files then simply make X and Y 2400 (in both files). BE aware that this is the bed size of an old Excellon machine, which you are not actually publishing data for, now it is a virtual bed and can be anything you want it to be (within reason).

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