Most people learn PCB design backwards: they open a CAD tool, watch a long tutorial, and only discover what a Gerber file is when a fab house asks for one. This guide proposes the reverse order. Start from the output — the fabrication files themselves — build a checking habit around them, and then take…
PCBWay’s ordering flow includes an engineering review: after you upload a Gerber set, their team checks the files and may come back with questions before production. That review is a real safety net — and a slow way to discover a problem you could have seen yourself in five minutes, days earlier, for free. Every…
Uploading a Gerber ZIP to JLCPCB feels reassuring: the site parses the files, renders a preview of your board, and shows layer information before you pay. That preview is genuinely useful — and genuinely limited. It shows you that the files can be read and roughly what they contain; it is not a substitute for…
Every board house receives the same thing from you: a set of files. Not your design, not your intent — files. The checks below are the twelve verifications that separate a set that will come back as the board you designed from a set carrying a silent defect, and every one of them is a…
Eagle has lived several lives: a standalone editor for decades, and now part of Autodesk’s Fusion environment, where board designs sit alongside the mechanical models they must fit. Whichever front end you use, the fabrication handoff has the same shape it always had in Eagle: the CAM processor turns the board into a set of…
EasyEDA makes ordering almost frictionless: design in the browser, export a ZIP of fabrication files, upload it to a board house — often JLCPCB, whose ordering flow EasyEDA is built to feed. The friction is the point of this guide. A one-click path from design to factory means the exported files can travel from the…
Altium Designer users work in a polished, integrated environment — and that is precisely the risk at ordering time. The board looks right in the editor, the output job runs, and the ZIP goes to the board house, but nobody has actually looked at the fabrication files as files. Altium’s Gerber output has more format…
KiCad designs the board; the fabrication files are what the factory builds. Between those two sits an export step — the Plot dialog — and everything that can go wrong there (a layer left unplotted, a drill file generated with different settings, a stale file mixed into the set) goes wrong silently, because KiCad keeps…
