Drill symbols

[GaryAtAMI]

I'm using the trial version of Ultiboard 10.1 Pro with permissions to export Gerber files for assurance before purchasing the product. I believe I'm already sold on the package as I'm also a LabView owner and huge fan. The idea of exporting the Drill Symbol Table is a great idea, but in Gerber format it's kind of useless to me. I really need the symbol table in DXF format. I can export all the layers just fine - it works great! I just can't seen to get the Drill Symbol Table in DXF format. My companys format policy on the AutoCAD drill drawing requires the drill symbol table & board plot, and each layer for incomming PCB inspection. I hope this issue will be addressed in a future release. As of right now, I have no way of satisfying the requirement to get the drill symbol table into a format I can use in AutoCAD. Or am I just doing something wrong? Thanks, Gary

[Fernando_D]

Hello,

Exporting Drill Symbols to DXF is not supported, you will need use a third party converter for this. I created a feature request with your suggestion.

Best Regards,

[GaryAtAMI]

Here it is 17 months later - still with no ability to DXF out the Drill Symbol table. There is no suitable free 3rd party program for this and I cannot justify the expense of purchasing something that may become a feature in the near future, Any ideas when this feature will be available?

[_user32 · Accepted solution]

GaryAtAMI,

Yes sorry for the confusion on feature requests, please let me explain:

When a feature is requested by the staff, this is not a guarantee that it will get into the product.   We have many pending requests that do not get addressed in the product for various reasons and other factors.   Some of the reasons include that other higher priority requests get scheduled ahead of these features (due to frequency or severity of the other requests - or other strategic initiatives) and/or other technical capabilities that might be challenging to do within a single release.  Some of these need to be broken up into several phases of the product before being implemented.

For this specific feature, although this has been requested several times, I can definitely tell you that as of now, we have no immediate plans to include this - due to competing priorities within R&D.   We are starting to work on some of the underlying import / export capabilities within Ultiboard, but at this time I cannot give you an exact date when this feature will be implemented.

As a community, please continue to comment as to how you feel about the priority level of this feature as we do continually reevaluate these requests. 

Ok, with that being said, I do have a possible work around.    However, although it is not ideal, here is a possible manual workaround that I've used on several other designs to include the symbol table in DXF.   Please let me know if this is workable for you or not.

1. You can generate a .gbr file of the Symbol table automatically. (File -> Export... -> select Gerber RS-274X -> Properties)

    1a. Navigate to the bottom of available layers and select "Drill Symbols" and hit the right arrow (->) button and hit 'Ok'.

    1b. Hit the 'Export' button with the Gerber RS-274X type selected.

    [ At this point you could use a 3rd party tool to convert the Gerber to DXF format (last time I checked there were tools in the ~$100 range) ]

To generate the DXF manually from Ultiboard

2. Open up the .gbr file just created...  It will be in the format "ProjectName(FileName) - Drill Symbols-Copper Top-Copper Bottom.gbr"

3. Copy the screen (depending on the PCB size you may need to copy multiple parts) into Microsoft Paint (I usually have 2 copies of Paint open)

4. Invert the colors so that the background is black and board information is white.   Save this file as a black and white .BMP file (the background should now be black).

5. In Ultiboard, within the same project, open up a new design (you may want to copy the board outline layer from the previous design to scale the BMP import correctly)

6. Click on the mechanical layer (Mechanical 1 or Mechanical 2) and choose Place -> Graphic -> Picture... and choose the black and white BMP just created.  

7. Draw a rectangular box to import the BMP into the Mechanical layer (you will need to resize based on scale).

[ At this point you may want to add some dimensional information for board size ]

8. Now since the table and the board is on a physical Ultiboard layer, you can export the Mechanical layer to DXF format (File -> Export -> DXF [choose properties - Mechanical 1 and Export to DXF]

Ok, I didn't say it would simple - and yes I agree that an automated way would be preferred.   I've zipped up the sample BMPs and JPG images to show the steps pictorially...

Regards,

Patrick Noonan

National Instruments

[GaryAtAMI]

WOW!  You're right about it being a work-around but it's definitly do-able!  Thank you for the explaination and the instructions.

Gary

[rnbd81]

Interesting approach....

Why am I able to view the individual gerber drill layers from the "symbols" file in Ulitboard, but when I open the same file in a third party gerber viewer it lumps all the layers together as one.

The problem is that I have a 4 layer board, and so I have 3 separate drill symbol legends.  One for "top to bottom", one for "top to inner 1", and one for "inner 2 to bottom".  Ultiboard stacks all three legends on top of each other, and then I cant fix it very well since they are all viewed as a single layer.