Best way to good PCB fabrication

[vanepp]

@robobob68

Thanks for the revisions. This is helpful in doing a ‘diff’ between .svg files.

I have (but not released yet because it may yet change with the new version of FritzingCheckPart) a version of PP.py that sorts the attributes. That means you can successfully diff svgs from older versions of Inkscape which output the xml in random order. I think Inkscape 1.0.2 already does this but the 0.9 series did not.

@robobob68

The diode you uploaded I think is your non-modified one from me. a) I dont see a difference in the files. b) If I edit my part and do a ‘load’ of your svg.pcb.* file from inside the .fzp file to effectively update my part, I get no difference in DRC.

Yes, I just replaced it with the correct one.

@robobob68

Your Molex fan connector DOES work for me in terms of DRC correction. Interesting. Let’s explore this so I can ground out on what I’m doing wrong in creating parts, please.

This is on my todo list so FritzingCheckPart can bitch about it as an error. I suppose I can move that to the top of the list and figure out what is actually wrong now.

@robobob68

The Molex part has a non-plated through-hole which I had in the copper layers as a 40 mil dia hole. You moved it to the silkscreen. Is that the correct location for it? And related … while it got moved, it disappeared and got relocated it seems.

I’ll have another look at the part in a bit. Yes, general practice is to put mounting holes on silkscreen rather than drill the hole. The reasoning is you can drag a hole from core parts/pcb in to the sketch if you want the mounting hole (place and size the hole to match the hole in silkscreen), but if it is in the part you have to modify the part to delete it if you don’t want the mounting hole. Either way will work, the silkscreen method is preferred.

@robobob68

Your non-related note about the keep-out zone - my project is not using the radio and so my belief is that I don’t care about the keep-out zone. If someone knows of ill effects to my traces from the antenna that would be problematic, I’m up for hearing about it but my thinking is that the radio is off so it doesn’t matter to me.

That should be correct. If you aren’t using the radio then you don’t care. Wires through the antenna won’t damage anything but will degrade the sensitivity of the antenna by modifying is pattern.

@robobob68

Ok so I ran with this and took my version and changed the scale to 1000 hoping to see all of my cx and cy values change as well as my ‘r’ values turn into “20” for a 40-mil diameter or 20mil stroke. NOPE. Didn’t happen. GAH. It seems I’m missing something in how to ‘rescale and clean up’ as you put it. Please enlighten me!

It is a little more complex than that. It is detailed here (with one not yet made modification)

Rescale a svg using Inkscape

I have made the mistake of electing myself “somebody” (as in “somebody should make a parts creation tutorial”) again. As punishment for this rash mistake, a single “here is how I fixed up this part” post has turned in to (so far ) 5 posts. These first three are infrastructure type posts that should be useful standalone. This one covers rescaling a drawing using Inkscape. It is being posted first because the real first document Configure Inkscape refers to this document and I neede…

The modification that I need to add to this document is that you also need to lock width to height in the tool bar. If you don’t do that circles get turned to ellipses due to floating point roundoff. With width locked to height they remain circles which cuts down the pain a whole lot.

@robobob68

Oh - also I did notice that my XML has transform/translate and I know this to be a “no no” so I did also remove that from my version in hopes that things would magically scale but they didn’t. My translate was just an offset so no biggie.

While I still prefer to remove transforms (because they sometimes cause problems) and I thought that they should be an expensive operation, Kjell says profiling Fritzing indicates transforms aren’t a performance issue and sometimes they are unavoidable. There are cases such as a transform in copper0 that isn’t in copper1 that FritzingCheckPart will flag as an error because it breaks things, but other than that they should be OK. I will go and look/experiment to see exactly what the issue between the working and not working parts is.

Peter