excellon processing

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Date: Sat, 08 Nov 2003 09:40:34 -0500
From: Neil Gershenfeld
To: mas863
Subject: drilling

I simplified the Excellon processing a bit, for boards with through-hole components:

• In Eagle, right-click in the Control Panel on the User Language Program drillcfg.ulp and Run in Board
• This will create your_file.drl, with the drill sizes
• Then, from the PCB window run the CAM job excellon.cam, which will create your_file.drd, with the hole locations
• Append the latter to the former, e.g. "cat your_file.drd >> your_file.drl"
• Read your_file.drl into cam.py; you should see the holes, and they're wound clockwise so that when you contour them the toolpath will be in the interior.
• No need to raster, just contour with a z down that goes through the board.
• When you mill it, make sure that there's an underlay material under the board that you can machine into!