How do I describe internal PCB cutouts to ZofZ?

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Qweewe
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Joined: Thu Apr 13, 2023 7:46 pm

How do I describe internal PCB cutouts to ZofZ?

Post by Qweewe »

I generally provide a PCB or Panel outline as an independent layer from the internal cutouts. So within Altium, Mech02 is the Panel outline, and M04 are the internal cutouts. I generally give the board fab the gerbers like that and they use their software to generate route paths. I can't see any way to get ZofZ to give me the internal cutouts from the gerbers.

I tried merging the outline and cutouts to a single layer, but it just ignores the cutouts.
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Zofz
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Re: How do I describe internal PCB cutouts to ZofZ?

Post by Zofz »

I have been using Altium for some time now and have also seen such a problem. It is related to interpreting some files as a drawing (board outline) and others as routing (drill files). That means, for example, a slot can be represented by an oval drawn out of two 180º arcs and two tracks in the case of drawing (track thickness is just a cosmetic feature). In the case of routing, the same slot would be just a piece of fat track, where the track's thickness represents the slot's thickness.
It looks like I have to interpret a single layer (outline) in both ways for Altium.
If you can provide screenshots - it will be clear we are talking about the same thing.
Qweewe
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Joined: Thu Apr 13, 2023 7:46 pm

Re: How do I describe internal PCB cutouts to ZofZ?

Post by Qweewe »

I eventually figured it out. The "Drill Plates" section is able to load a gerber or a drill file. So I just load the internal cutout gerber into the drill plate and change it to unplated. I then add the panel outline gerber to the layer stack and define it as a board outline. It then imports perfectly. The soldermask covers the internal cutouts, but I can fix that easily in Altium before generating the gerbers.

I still have to use Solidworks to add the v-score cuts and merge the Altium 3D output with the output from ZoZ, but that's not too hard.

Very cool software. I've been searching for a good way to get 3D models from gerbers for about 20 years, so I'm really happy to have this now!
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