Electronics > Manufacturing & Assembly

GerbMerge 1.9.4 (a command-line tool to merge multiple RS-274X Gerber files)

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Oleg Artamonov:
Hello everyone

TL;DR: I've updated GerbMerge to work properly with Linux/Windows/Cygwin, and to support both inches and millimeters. It is here: https://github.com/unwireddevices/gerbmerge

Some weeks ago we needed to order a lot of PCBs for a single project — let's say it's a kind of DIY / rapid prototyping kit with ~30 extension boards. To save some money, I decided to combine all PCBs into two large sheets; of course, PCB manufacturer can do it for me, but I like the idea "if you want something done [well], do it yourself", moreover, I needed different number of different PCBs, etc. Easier to do it myself than to explain it to PCB fab.

So I looked for some tool that can help me and found... nothing... $699... "call us to get a quote"... $1899... GerbMerge! GerbMerge is a python script, GPL, totally free to use and modify, created specifically for this job — merging a lot of gerbers and drill files into a single set.

Unfortunately, it didn't work. GerbMerge seemed to be maintained by different — unrelated — people with years-long unmantained periods, so the most recent version: a) doesn't install, b) doesn't work with metric units; c) doesn't work with Cygwin... there're some patches to fix some errors, but they are made by different people, do not aligned with each other... some of them doesn't even work.

So I had no choice but to fix it.

Here is the result: https://github.com/unwireddevices/gerbmerge

As of version 1.9.4, GerbMerge was tested with both Eagle and DipTrace (btw, in my opinion, much better than Eagle, has free non-commercial version as well, cheaper commercial versions, etc), both inches and millimeters, both Linux and Windows (both native and Cygwin). Installation is semi-automated with pip - details in the README.

Just wanted everyone to know.

P.S. Proofpic.

djsb:
Thanks for putting in the effort to work on this. I tried Gerbmerge a couple of years ago and it was VERY slow. I will give this a try on Windows with some of my designs and report back (eventually).

Oleg Artamonov:

--- Quote from: djsb on January 31, 2016, 01:40:16 pm ---I will give this a try on Windows with some of my designs and report back (eventually).
--- End quote ---

The board on the proofpic was generated in something like 15 minutes on low-end AMD Sempron (CentOS Linux, python 2.6) — I started it and went away to get some coffee. On Core i* pretty good results should be ready in a few minutes (unfortunately, there's no way to tell how good the result already is without stopping the script and checking its output with Gerber viewer).

Cenkron:
I am gratified to find this as I need to make a large number of very small boards, well below the usual minimum size.
Unfortunately, I have little familiarity with Python, and I can't figure out how to build it. In the section about native Windows, the first line

    c:\python27\python.exe setyp.py sdist

I didn't find the command setyp.py, and I suspect it is mistyped.
Also, I have no idea what sdist parameter represents, and where the CD should be to issue this command (i.e., what "navigate to its folder, and run", means).  Who is "it".

The second line,

    c:\python27\scripts\pip.exe istall dist\gerbmerge-1.9.4.zip

it looks like "install" is misspelled, and it looks like it is taking a TAR file as a parameter to create a batch file.  How will this give me a command to execute?
None of this makes sense to me since I am more into the boards than the trickiness here.
Can anyone tell me how to install this so I can try it?

Cenkron

[PTM]:
not support metric.
tool list is empty.
smalest tool =999.9

but with options no-trim-excellion list is not empty. why dont work?

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