Importing ADI Gerbers to Altium - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 24, 2018, 05:59:47 am
content: I am trying to import an ADI evaluation board Gerbers into Altium 17 but getting a mess. The drill layer is off and all tracks are hair thin, apparently because aperture data is not loaded properly. What would be a way to import the Gerbers (ADI site is down at the moment, I attached the zip archive )

author: T3sl4co1l
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 24, 2018, 10:06:19 am
content: Not sure how to fix broken apertures...Do they only have gerbers handy?Layers can be aligned by command though.Tim

author: CuD
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: August 24, 2018, 05:54:19 pm
content: Hi Bud,I think I can help here.Within CAMTastic there is an aperture wizard, these look to be PADS formatted Aperture files, but the default wizard has a bit of a difference. The following should help you get the gerbers loaded in with proper apertures.1) Open AD as Admin, this will be necessary to modify the Aperture Wizard file, as it is still located in Program Files2) With AD open as Admin open a CAMTastic document, start with a blank one3) Within CAMTastic go to Tables-->Aperture List Wizard4) In the Wizard dialog click the Pulldown menu for Wizard name, locate and select Pads-15) Still in the Wizard dialog, there is a field for Skip Extra Lines, set this to 1(this will cause it to ignore the line of === used to separate, if we do not ignore this line the wizard will error out and ignore all following apertures and nothing will load.) after setting the line skip to 1, press the Save button, and this will save the changes to the AWS file. Remember, admin is required, if you get an error about saving you forgot to run as admin.6) now that the Wizard has been fixed, use File-->Import-->Quick Load and browse to the directory of your gerbers7) At the bottom of the quickload dialog, change the Autodetect Apertures and select Pads-1 which was just modifiedWith that set, press OK to start the quickload, next you will be prompted for Drill units.9) Set drill decimal and integer to 3:3(Default 2:3 will make them too small) Absolute, and Trailing Zero Suppression10) Gerber should look proper, drills should be proper size, now you will need to align the drill to the layers using Edit-->Layers-->Align Selective(CTRL+L)With Align selective, I usually turn off all other layers, then enable a signal layer that has a pad to match a drill, and that drill layer. First select the pad to align the drill layer to, then move over and select the drill that belongs to it, and that drill layer should snap into place. Do this for each drill layer.Hope that helps!

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 24, 2018, 07:24:46 pm
content: Thanks CuD, but still no sausage. Apertures files load and appear in the table in the CAM sheet but the tracks are still 1 pixel wide. Is a menu or a command to "apply" the aperture table to loaded Gerbers ?Same the drill files. They load but all holes appear as just 1 pixel dots.QuoteWith these specific drill files the proper scale setting seems to be 4:3 (though also misalligned with the Gerbers, Ctrl+L does not seem do work to allign them as it is not possible to select a object on the drill layer)

author: CuD
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: August 24, 2018, 08:41:41 pm
content: Apertures would apply automatically to all assigned items, no need for any extra steps. If you look in the Apertures table the DCodes should have a definition, if they show as undefined or the sizes are wrong and came in way off scale, things would look the same. You could even go and enter them manually and just read them from the REP files, but that would be a bit tediousI have attached the CAM Document I loaded your files into, I did it with AD18 though. I only aligned one drill layer in this one while making sure my instructions worked, so the others are still down near the origin.

author: Bud
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 25, 2018, 12:23:36 am
content: Thank you CuD, I was able to load your file and re-allign a few layers to produce a final Camtastic file. I suspected all of the time it is a buggy Altium 17