Newbie ask: Can someone please take a quick look at some Gerbers for me?

[rthorntn]

Hi there all you wonderfully helpful people!

I'm a beginner and found some Gerbers online and I'm just trying to find out if everything is there for me to send them to PCBWay, could a Gerber guru take a quick look please, someone mentioned that they were in an older incompatible format and Eagle on Mac craps itself trying to open them?

For one thing PCBWay needs to know which file maps to which layer.

If you can help please PM me.

Thanks for looking.

Cheers
Richard

[Mattylad]

Can you post them online with a link to download them?

[Philfreeze]

I can only second Mattylad.
Post a convenient download link and someone will do that for you.

[rthorntn]

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wLZZb8StFaq9_T9Em74J0n16FIV4i_Rp/view?usp=sharing

[Philfreeze]

What I managed to figure out:

Most of the files are probably Gerber-274-D.

The .DRL is an Excellon-alike-file or an Excellon file with a corrupted header.
Usually you will find the drill table in the header of this file but the header doesn't make any sense (just random characters), this means I can extract the coordinates of all drills but I cannot extract the sizes.
There are only 15 drill sizes though so it would be in the realm of possible to restore the drill size with a lot of time and research. (I would need the schematics so I can search the correct drill sizes of the connectors etc).

Then there is the most important file, the .gwk file. This is a GraphiCode project file and it includes some necessary information like the aperture list.
You can request a free trial of GraphiCode on their website (http://www.graphicode.com/ ).
It is very likely that this file also includes a drill table or at least it 'should' do so but I cannot find anything usable.

If you want to reproduce everything by yourself you have to download Graphicode and Open the gwk file with it (all other layers must be in the same dir). To include the drill layer you will have to delete the first line (the corrupted header up until the '%') then you can import it into Graphicode.
The drill layer also needs to be rotated.

So what you need now is a way to either extract the drill table either from the .DRL file or the .gwk file or you have to search for the drill table somewhere else.
I assume you have an assembly pdf, a BOM and maybe a schematic. With this information it would be possible to recreate the drill table.
Sometimes PCB designer also include a Drill guide output with the drill table (pdf or a picture or something like that). If you have something like that it would be really easy to recreate the drill  table.

I have included Gerber-274-X output of all layers with standard Altium layer names (except the inner layers which are called gl2 and gl3; I do not know if this order is correct).

[IconicPCB]

Drill file is indeed corrupted and needs to be rotated 90 degrees CCW with a bit of an offset.

GWK does contain a drill table but it is incorrect. The apertures are incorrect when used to display the drill file processed as above.

A bit of effort will be needed to do group edit of drill apertures so that a reasonable copper anulus remains in place.

The design is a four layer board with the third layer down an earth plane,

You can download Gerbv a simple gerber viewer to view the attached files.
Locate top layer file ( easy enough to do by inspection) and then view the top layer drill file overlaid on top of each other.

Inspect the drill information compared to actual top layer pad and component whihc needs to fit in the hole and take note of drill location, current size and new size.

Go through the drill file identifying anomalies and make note of the details .

Send me the corrections and i shall edit the drill sizes for a second round ( of corrections).

[rthorntn]

Thanks Philfreeze!

Thanks IconicPCB!

Does the attached BOM help?

If the BOM helps and someone wants to take it on I would be happy to Paypal them some money?

[Philfreeze]

Not very convenient or precise but the attached pdf does the job.

I don't have any time in the next two days, then I will clean up your gerber.

So apparently you are rebuilding an Atari Falcon 030, correct?

[rthorntn]

Thanks Philfreeze, totally awesome, very much appreciated.

They are for a microbox, was supposed to be a smaller version of the falcon:

http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102672949

These are supposed to be for the normal Falcon but the files supposedly don't work either:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ERg_P3qy3VhByWBUDPsNIxpO35zK3Yxq/view?usp=sharing

Not sure I can build a microbox or even a plain falcon but (at a minimum) I would totally have a small run of PCB's fabbed for nostalgic reasons, if I have some made (and if you wanted one) a PCB would definitely be coming your way.  I guess I'm a fan of PCB p0rn 

[Philfreeze]

Sorry for the delay, I did not have access to my Altium PC for the last week for private reasons.
However, today I managed to finish your gerbers with excellon drill files and everything.

If you want to verify it for yourself you could use a gerber viewer like the one JLC has when you want to oder a pcb (online) or you can download this: https://www.zofzpcb.com/

You can also wait and see if someone else verifies the data but I am pretty sure everything should be correct.

If you are going to order some I would gladly get two boards as well. I will pay my share of the pcb manufacturing cost and I will pay the postage from Australia to Switzerland (around 20$ with Economy Air).
I will DM you my address and mail so you can contact me a bit more conveniently.


Note:
I doubt you will be able to assemble the boards, I looked at the BOM and it looks to me like it would be quite hard to build one these days (not impossible but hard). So if you order PCBs make sure you are okay with leaving them unpopulated.
If you just want the PCBs because they look nice I would suggest you pay a small amount more (5-10$) for ENIG surface finish, it usually looks a lot better than HASL (at least in my opinion). You can also get a different colored soldermask (blue,red,black etc.) for about 10-15$.

[rthorntn]

Amazing, thank you!