Electronics > Manufacturing & Assembly

Silkscreen clean up from itead/seeed/etc?

(1/3) > >>

mrflibble:
Does itead or seed or <fill in> clean up the silkscreen? By which I mean, if the silkscreen covers exposed solderpads, do they remove this silkscreen or not? Never? Sometimes when they feel like it?

I also read the following on this here page with itead quirks.

"Don't assume they [itead] will perform Silkscreen Clean-up for you, because you may end up with silkscreen covering your exposed copper if you do. Specifically lines seem to be cleaned up ok, but text seems to be left alone, so you can get results such as this ..."

This has sort of been my working assumption. Text will not get cleaned up, lines will (at least I hope so XD). The reason is that quite a few of the components I used had silkscreen (lines) over the pads. Cleaning up all the lib parts at this point simply was not a viable option since that would take far too much time.

Another option that I can think of is to do some clever operations on the gerbers, but at this point in time it was safer for me to hope itead cleans up silkscreen lines. Probably safer than messing with the gerbers myself and then stuffing it up. :P

Anyways, I was wondering what your experiences are with itead silkscreen cleanup in particular, and seeed/The Rest [tm] in general.

Smokey:
I've only used Iteed.  If they do look at the layers, then they don't put much effort into it.  I've had them put silk right on pads when I forgot to clean it up first.  It's my own fault after all :)

The worse problem is silk alignment, which they are pretty terrible at.  Make sure you don't put silk too close to pads and expect them to be dead nuts on.  Watch the line width of silk screen too.  If it's too small it just comes out as a bunch of dots.

All that said I don't plan on switching any time soon since they are so cheap.  It's not like I'm doing super complicated or production level boards with them though.

mrflibble:
Thanks! :) That's good to know. Not what I hoped to hear, but can't have it all. ;) In that case I can probably count on having silkscreen on several pads. Oh well, if so that was a calculated risk. I really wasn't going to put hours of extra effort into cleaning all that up. This was a prototype board, so if I have to scratch away some silk so be it. :P

The question was more for future reference ... So for the next board I'll have to have a good method to clean up the gerbers.

Is there some handy gerber tool with which I can do that? Essentially it would be something like:
- copy solder into tmp layer
- expand tmp layer by some margin (say 10 mil)
- mask off silk with tmp layer

Preferably under linux, but I'm not too picky about that.

daveatol:
That seems like quite poor form if they are printing the silk overlay over the pads. I've used Seeed (and other online providers - not Itead however), and I've never had the overlay printed on the pads

c4757p:
I don't think it's poor form, but then, I'm not too experienced with PCB manufacturers. Seems to me that proper form would be to do precisely what you tell them to do - if your Gerbers have silkscreen over exposed copper, then so will your PCB. Don't most packages have an option to clear silkscreen from the pads when generating the Gerbers, anyway?

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page