I’ve spent some time lately sorting out a utility to tile Gerber files. I’ve wanted a utility to do this for a while, but I couldn’t find a utility that would work for me. Then I came across libgerbv, which is the backend library of gerbv, a Gerber viewer.

Since then, I’ve submitted two patches to gerbv, which were both accepted really quickly (yay!).

I had some other issues with libgerbv that I have fixed locally, and I’m working on cleaning up my patch for submission. It needs to touch some more things than my last two, so it’ll take me a little longer. I’ll be talking about that more soon when it’s compatible with gerbv CVS (CVS == sneeze).

It was only after I’d written most of the utility and come across the first libgerbv bug that I discovered that gerbv can do Gerber file tiling when invoked from the command line. My utility has a slightly different than gerbv’s. Anyway, more on that later.

Spirals

I’ve also been working on making a utility to make spirals on PCBs. It’s available here. If you’re interested, you can build it like so:

git clone git://gitorious.org/pcb-spiral/mainline.git pcb-spiral
cd pcb-spiral
git submodule init
git submodule update
make

Maybe it’ll be useful to someone else too…

Tags: gerbv, hacking, pcb, spiral