Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Homebrew PCBs

Hi Group,
I made a test pcb in TCI3. I saved it as a Gerber file. I
then put it in KCam. The round pads became eight sided shapes.
Forty-two pads became over 1000 lines of code. The Gcode drew the pads
in the same order I drew them in TCI3. So I suspect if you don't want
your machine to spend more time traveling than cutting you better
have a plan.
I will admit I have very little experence with Gerber. But I
get the feeling the "Traveling Salesman Sydrome" is hiding there
also. Plotting out a PCBoard with a good PLT file is much faster than
a GCode file run on a homemade PCBMill. A Sherline or Taig running at
10,000 rpm can only cut circuit boards at 5" per minute. So do a test
board before it is too late!

John