![]() It has full component auto-place AND trace auto-routing (we haven't used either of these for our projects, but it's nice to know it's there) AND includes helpful auto-drawing when placing traces by hand. In short, we think DipTrace is an excellent bit of kit. It's as simple to understand as ExpressPCB, making your own components and layout patterns is a doddle and it has all the fancy export options you'd expect to find (including dxf and gerber). Hobby users haven't been forgotten either - from the print preview screen you can mirror the output (for toner transfer/press-n-peel users) and it even has a "outline the traces for CNC output" option for anyone who wants to rout the traces out from copper clad board on a CNC routing machine. It took us just a few hours of playing about tonight to not only create a library of our most commonly used components (amended to include big fat pads for easy soldering) but also to draw an intermediate-level schematic and layout the PCB for it. ![]() After three hours with Eagle we were still trying to work out how to move more than two components without screwing up the entire design! In less than three hours we had a board printed and ready for etching. ![]() Look out for future posts detailing how to use DipTrace. ![]() Some EDA programs will replace spirals with straight-line segments in gerber files.We'll be using it a lot in future and hope to convert a lot of our earlier projects using it - starting with our current miniature guitar project. This spiral is made of intersecting semi-circular segments of arithmetically increasing radii. The straight-line segments that make up the line will move towards other features on the concave side of the curve - this creates DFM errors - by using numbers a few percent higher than manufacturer recommendations, you can avoid this problem. Some round shapes such as copper pour fillets, spirals, circles, etc… will be converted into straight-line segments or polygons by your EDA program.
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