Some questions about a circuit board are not electrical at all. Will the board fit the enclosure? Do the mounting holes line up with the standoffs? Where exactly does the connector clear the panel cutout? Those questions live in CAD software, and CAD software speaks DXF. Gerbv closes that gap: DXF is one of its…
Inspection is only half the value of a Gerber viewer. The other half is showing other people what you found: the colleague who does not run CAD software, the client approving a board, the assembler asking where a connector sits, the design review that needs a picture of the stack as checked. Gerbv exports the…
Of all the files in a fabrication set, the drill file is the easiest to forget and the most expensive to get wrong. Copper layers describe what the board looks like; the Excellon drill file describes every hole that will be physically drilled through it — component leads, vias, mounting holes — and a board…
A board can look perfect on screen and still be wrong by half a millimetre. Visual inspection catches the dramatic export failures — mirrored layers, missing files, holes beside pads — but the failures that scrap boards quietly are numerical: a connector footprint whose pads are a pitch too narrow, a mounting hole that moved,…
Gerber files do not arrive as a board. They arrive as a pile of single-layer drawings that only become a board when they are stacked in the right order, in the same coordinate space, and inspected against each other. Loading and aligning layers in Gerbv is therefore less about the opening clicks and more about…
Every printed circuit board starts its factory life as a set of files, not as a board. Your EDA tool exports those files, the board house reads them, and between the two sits the most valuable ten minutes in the whole process: opening the exported set in an independent viewer and looking at what will…
