Does Anyone Use "Viewmate"?

Space Varmint

New Member

• Nov 17, 2009

• #1

I drafted up a board in Eagle CadSoft and when I import it to Viewmate it does not import the drill file. I did my drill file in Excellon. Here's what I get:

 

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DirtyLude

Well-Known Member

• Nov 17, 2009

• #2

I installed Win7 and haven't reinstalled it, yet, but I've used it before. From what I remember it was a pain to figure out how to import the drill file and specify the file type.

I'll try to get it going again.

 

RadioRon

Well-Known Member

• Nov 17, 2009

• #3

I think that Excellon outputs drill coordinates in ascii for use by the fabricator's machinery. So there is no Gerber drill info to put into Viewmate, I think. I've generated drill gerbers by mistake before and they showed up no problem in viewmate, but when I corrected to excellon it doesn't import because its not supposed to.

 

DirtyLude

Well-Known Member

• Nov 22, 2009

• #4

I finally reinstalled my version of Viewmate.

Your excellon drill file should be a TXT file. If you are trying to import the .dri file, that's the wrong one.

In viewmate select a new layer and select file->import->drill & route. Select Options on the bottom of the open screen that comes up. You may have to fiddle with this. I changed the default for zero's to 'all digits present' and changed the units to 'metric' and the file imported correctly.

 

Space Varmint

New Member

• Nov 22, 2009

• #5

Cool! Let me try it. I already submitted it to a couple of board houses and they didn't see a problem but I always like to check my work first. Thanks DirtyLude.

 

Space Varmint

New Member

• Nov 22, 2009

• #6

Hey? What is the extension on that Excellon file?

 

DirtyLude

Well-Known Member

• Nov 22, 2009

• #7

The excellon file extension is .txt

Here's the import parameters I used for this, but I think I used different parameters before. Anyway, this worked.

Image is big, I haven't installed my simple image resize programs, yet, so I'll just leave it as an icon.

 

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Space Varmint

New Member

• Nov 22, 2009

• #8

Oh great! Will have to try it later. Got to go pick up wife from hospital. She fractured her wrist. But thanks again. I tried importing the ".drl" and of course that didn't work...lol