Homebrew PCBs

Cristian, Stefan,

www.platincnc.com is definitely a good catch and even the price of 
$150 seems to be on a low end for that kind of sw. Actually, that 
package answered my next question: is it possible to get an NC drill 
file out of a bmp scan, sounds insane, doesn't it? In short: yes it 
does and very good, too! First I tried to do it  w/o platinum by 
converting PCB (in PDF) to DXF, my way. I used 
http://www.cadkas.com/downengpdf.php 'PDF 2 DXF 2.0', scroll down. 
The quality of the dxf conversion is amazing but a thick PCB line 
consists of a high number of thin dxf lines. That was the end of my 
trial although I can see a potential of that method, except for: no 
NC file would come out of it. 

Then I tried platinum. I got a very good conversion of a bitmap 
image into a NC drill file. Awesome! I couldn't view the NC file 
because a demo has this feature disabled but I clearly saw that the 
program did recognize all holes as holes, which was my next question!

I couldn't get the Gerber out of the program. I only got 'milling 
paths' and I think it refers to isolation milling and if so then I 
believe that having a TT with a laminator and a laser printer (all 
even low grade) will produce excellent results in the hands of a 
skillful TT-er :) Hey, I do TTs just to cheer me up.

So, I also have a problem getting rid of that heavy raster screen 
(background) on the screen  but it is probably my lack of experience 
with it. Not even knowing the details, it seems to me that that 
program is excellent.  Thank you guys for an enjoyable Sunday 
morning  Mike



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