kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Christian Gagneraud <chgans@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 21 February 2018 at 05:19, Ouabache Designworks <z3qmtr45@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Does Kicad have anyone working with these folks?
>
> Found this on semiwiki.com
>
>
> Hemant enthusiastically replied, “We encourage anyone interested in
> improving board design processes to join the consortium – there is no fee,
> and no contracts. There are both corporate and associate levels of
> membership, based upon the level of participation of interest. Our web site
> provides lots of information, including the current approved standard and
> the discussion underway for new enhancements in the next revision.”
>
> http://www.ipc2581.com/articles-and-blogs/
>
> “Also, at the upcoming IPC APEX EXPO 2018 conference, designers, EDA
> companies, and manufacturing and assembly houses will be sharing a wealth of
> information on IPC-2581.”
>
> http://www.ipcapexexpo.org/html/default.htm
>
> IPC-2581 is clearly not “just another standard”, in reference to Professor
> Tanenbaum’s quote. This activity has already improved processes and
> procedures for PCB design data exchange and release, saving money. Its
> adoption will undoubtedly (and rapidly) become more pervasive.

Hi there,

I have been exploring gerber and IPC-2581, I have some prototype code
written in Qt/C++, see
https://gitlab.com/chgans/le-ipc2581-viewer

Most of the code is generated, i've rewritten their XML schema into a
mard-down like syntax, which is them parsed by a python script to
generate all the data structure and the XML parsing, the rest of the
code is just visualisation

The standard is sort of open, I was able to write this viewer based on
publicly available document and sample files, see:
- https://gitlab.com/chgans/le-ipc2581-viewer/tree/master/docs
- https://gitlab.com/chgans/le-ipc2581-viewer/tree/master/testcases.

It might take a while for this standard to be adopted, but you have to
realise that this standard offer way more than gerber, it's been
designed for improving the whole design to manufacturing chain.
Just an example, it has built-in support for stack-up specifications,
covering both physical and electrical constraints, ...

Major EDA vendors have support for exporting in this format (according
to IPC website).
Some stack-up specialised (proprietary) software support this format
as an input and output.

It should not be difficult to create an exporter for KiCAD, reading,
interpreting and rendering this files is another story.

Chris

>
>
>
> John Eaton
>
>
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