Homebrew PCBs

"Kevin Morgan" <prizes@...> writes:
> Do you happen to know whether anyone uses gEDA and PCB to mill 
> circuit boards (that is, isolation routing)?

There's someone working on DXF export, which is the first step.  But
if you have something that works from gerbers, pcb can produce those
(duh).

PCB has a plugin interface that lets you add more exporters (or other
functionality[*]) without recompiling pcb itself, so if you know how
to do isolation milling "in general", it should be easy to apply it to
pcb's internal data structure.  We have a polygon clipping module,
too, so you could in theory start with "everything" and clip out all
the copper you want to keep, and use the resulting set of polygons to
drive the cutter.  I'm just guessing on that, since I'm not familiar
with the clipper's internals.

But none of us have mills, so we haven't worked on it yet ;-)

[*] http://www.delorie.com/pcb/ has my RenumberBlock and Teardrops
    plugins, for example.