Which Arduino shield part will make a shield shaped pcb?

[stryker]

Hi,

Not sure if this is a bug with the gerber viewers but I've made up a design for an Arduino shield using both the sparkfun longpads part, and now the adafruit ARDUINO-BPLACE part and neither of them is rendered as a shield shape by the Mayhew Labs web viewer.  Also, unlike the template for the Dangerous Prototypes Sick-of-Beige, a polygon for GND doesn't get constrained to the shape either in ratsnest view.  In each case it's a rectangular board.

Mayhew has a demo gerber to view which is the classic Arduino shield shape, so it is possible.

Rather than rework this another time in trial and error - or send away a design and have it come back a boring rectangle - has anyone used either of those to make a shield that seeed etc cut to the classic shape?  If not, what part do you recommend that has the correct shape and dimensions to do this?

Thanks, Geoff

[c4757p]

neither of them is rendered as a shield shape by the Mayhew Labs web viewer.

This viewer always renders all my silkscreens as big white blobs and has never recognized anything I would call a board outline. Don't trust it...

[Jon Chandler]

You might try submitting your Gerbers to FreeDFM.com.  This is a service provided by Advanced Circuits that checks for and catches many errors, and also provides illustrations of each layer.

[kizzap]

If you are really worried, feel free to email me the .brd file, and I'll try render it up with an eagle add-on I've found, which is somewhat decent, otherwise you could try eagleup which converts the eagle board into a google sketchup component.

-kizzap

[stryker]

Hi,

I just spun up a quick and dirty re-using the Adafruit one that reads like it should include the shape - and then used Viewplot for a 2D view of the gerber and it's confirming what the 3D viewers showed. 

The quest continues.
Geoff

[stryker]

Hi,

Mike over at the Adafruit forum helped me find the answer.  The shield-shaped template that should be on the dimension layer is on a silkscreen layer instead, and this part appears to be shared among many libraries.  Moving the shape to the right layer and the gerber viewers show the right shape now.

Adafruit forum thread linked here.

Cheers !
Geoff