Electronics > PCB/EDA/CAD
Yet another gerber viewer needs your feedback http://www.pcbxprt.com
ghent360:
I wanted to have a gerber viewer which works without having to install stuff: http://www.pcbxprt.com
This project is written in TypeScript and does all the work in your browser. Nothing to install, just go to the web site and open a zip file with your gerbers. You gerber data is processed on your machine, not sent to a remote server in a basement (or worse a datacenter).
I've tested it with the latest Firefox and Chrome. It uses the mouse wheel to scroll and Safary has some beef with the wheel events, other parts work. I'm not a Windows user, so Edge may or may not work. IE definitely does not work.
Screenshot:
Any feedback is welcome. Especially interested if you have a gerber that does not render correctly.
ebastler:
Nice; thank you for making this available! I gave it a quick try on the current Firefox for Win10, with a few small (on the order of 160*100 mm²) two-layer boards. A few comments in no particular order:
Rendering was certainly correct with everything I tried. The only exception was a somewhat pathological design with a big bitmap in the silkscreen layer, where I lost patience after a few minutes.
It would be nice if it could respond a bit faster. Panning, zooming out, enabling/disabling layers. (This refers to the non-pathological boards I tried. Despite the small size, there was always a lag of a second or two -- enough to make you wonder whether the software had got your command, especially when selecting layers.)
The TypeScript implementation probably limits what you can do on that front; maybe you could a least give a preliminary indication that something is happening? E.g. when toggling layers on/off, toggle the checkbox immediately, then redraw. Or when panning or zooming, draw an outline immediately, the render the actual PCB? Zooming in is nice in this repsect, first shows the magnified low-res version, then adds high res when ready.
For the "pathological" bitmap mentioned above, I noticed that the rendering attempt slowed down the whole browser (other tabs), to the point of making it unusable. Probably due to the way Firefox implements TypeScript, hence not something you can influence? But it was really annoying and a bit worrying. (I didn't want to lose what I had typed here, for example.) So if you can work around this, it would be worth a try.
The actual rendered colors change in non-obvious ways. Copper layer alone is shown in red; when I add (white) silkscreen, the copper color changes to a strange, low contrast light brown or gold. Other common combinations, e.g. copper plus soldermask, also result in unexpected color changes.
The default choice of layer colors doesn't work for me. Top and bottom copper both show in the same color -- can't see much, with just those two layers enabled.
That's what struck my eye in the first test. Again, the rendering is nice, and the handling is straightforward -- I like your work! If you could tweak some of the aspects above, this could very well become my preferred Gerber viewer.
EDIT: Typos... I like your work!
ghent360:
Thank you. All good points.
Re: speed
I booted my box in Windows, and tried it there - it was noticeably slow, compared to Ubuntu. Same HW just different OS. For some reason Chrome, FF and Edge on Windows were much slower. I'll dig some more to figure out why. In general Windows has much better graphics drivers, so browsers should be faster not slower. Pure speculation: maybe it is some enhanced security sandbox thing.
Bitmaps tent to generate lots of drawing commands. Long running JavaScript dies have the effect of "freezing" the browser. I can add a limit on how many polygons I draw before making the browser take a breath.
Re: crazy colors
Yes. I realize my default layer color scheme is quite confusing. I'll try to explain what I was going for, not to dismiss your point - just to make it less "crazy":
If you select a single layer it would render it in dark red on white background, which I think gives decent contrast.
If you select more than one layer it would try to do "natural color rendering". For example select an "outline" layer and copper layer - it tries to mimic the copper color on FR4 natural color board; add a "solder mask" layer and it tries to mimic the oshpark themed "purple" PCB; all the silk screen and it would look even better. All this works when you select layers from the same side. It is mildly confusing if you only select copper and silk screen layers - it should mimic what your board would look like without a solder mask. It goes horribly wrong if you try to select two copper layers for example.
All that said, I'll change the default layer color scheme to something reasonable (suggestions are welcome) and leave the "natural" colors as something to experiment on in my own time.
mikeselectricstuff:
Pretty neat.
Doesn't display longer filenames properly -cuts off the end (see image)
Would be useful to be able to show individual files as well as .zips
Needs an option to invert layers for planes, also set transparency
Speed is mostly OK even on my craziest 6L complex PCB (W10,Firefox), only file it struggled with was a huge panel of 1.5 metre long strips which stalled the browser for about a minute after I gave up and closed the tab - probably a memory issue
mikeselectricstuff:
Also needs an option to flip, to check bottom-side idents etc.
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