FreePCB User Guide

 Version 1.2


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7. Tutorial (continued)

7.12 Making Gerber and Drill Files

The final step in this tutorial is making the Gerber files and Drill file which you would send to the PCB manufacturer. You might want to review Section 5.18: Exporting Gerber and Drill Files before proceeding.

Select Generate CAM files... from the File menu. "CAM" is an acronym for "Computer-Aided Manufacturing". The following dialog should appear.

In the Files section, select the files that you wish to create by checking or unchecking the boxes next to them. 

In the Gerber file options section, you can select:

The Gerber file dimensions section allows you to set numeric parameters for the Gerber files. When you make a real board, you would get these from the PCB manufacturer. The values shown above are fairly typical of a low-cost, multilayer process.

The Output folder is the destination folder for the files which will be created. By default, this is a subfolder of the project folder named "CAM". You can change it if you like. The folder will be created if it doesn't already exist (although its parent folder must exist).

Now click Create files to make the files. The following dialog should appear.

If there were any errors, messages will appear in the dialog. Usually, an error will result in FreePCB aborting that file and going on to the next one. Click OK to dismiss the dialog.

Now you can view your Gerber and drill files using a Gerber Viewer such as ViewMate by PentaLogix (which is free, and available here). ViewMate can also print check plots on your printer. You should ALWAYS check your files before using them to make a PCB. Also, read Section 5.173: Drill Sizes for important information about the drill file.

Screenshots of the Gerber files for the top silk-screen, top copper and inner 1 copper layers of our tutorial project are shown below. These look pretty crude in the screenshots. To appreciate just how precise they really are, you should open your own files in ViewMate and zoom in on some of the smaller features.

 

Well, that's the end of the tutorial. I have tried to cover most of the major features of FreePCB. Now you should be ready to create a board of your own.


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