Pathological results from Gerber Viewer

[Brenda]

Hi,

First of all thanks for making the Gerber Viewer available.

I’ve used it a few times before to check boards I’ve made in Eagle and CAM processed with Seeed’s DRU and CAm files.
No problems.

But I just tried it today and the board looks ok but for the fact that the board outline and drill holes are scaled up by an enormous amount.
I tried another gerber viewer http://www.gerber-viewer.com/default.aspx and it seemed ok.
On this one http://paragonrobotics.com/halo-s/?jumpToTab=gerberViewer however it has the drill hole scaling issue.

I ran the CAM job a few times and checked the formats & options were ok.
Possibly an Imperial/Metric issue?

I’m inclined to trust the CAM file from Seeed but theres a bit of me thats got The Fear about getting charged (a lot) extra for making a board thats 337.63 in2 rather than about 4 in2.

I’m UK based with a Win7 x64 Precision T7500, Nvidia GPU, UK regional settings. Using Firefox 40.0.3
That stuffs probably irrelevant but you can never tell.

Thanks for any hints you may have,

‘Brenda’

[Brenda]

Oops, forgot to add a link to the files.

http://www83.zippyshare.com/v/8V8GzijA/file.html

Its a no waiting no reg file site. File is a 66k zip of 8 gerber files.

[texy]

Hi,
I don’t see any reply from Mayhew, but for what it’s worth, I have exactly the same problem.
It appears to be a problem with the way the viewer deals with the drill file – if you don’t include it when you grad the rest of the gerber files to the browser, the resulting render is the correct size.
Hope this helps,
Texy

[John]

I had this problem too, with a KiCad file. It worked with a previous Proteus file so I compared the two. It’s to do with how Mayhew Labs’ gerber view parses the dimensions.

It appears it expects a leading zero (thou cords?), rather than the default KiCad exports, which is decimal format:

Decimal format: X4.9606Y-3.6575 (buggers up board size and drill location as described)
Leading zeros: X049606Y-036575 (works fine)

So the fix is to write leading zeros if your CAD package has the option. If the developer of 3d Gerber Viewer is looking at this, I imagine it would be an easy fix for the parser too.

[Author]

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