Drawn pads or flashes?

[drmorgan]

I was going to post this in the post processing forum but I'm relating my question to PADS...

CAM tools want flashes not draws. Especially if you want to do things in the CAM tool like comapring netlist's and importing 356 netlist. Can PADS generate gerber data using only flashes?

I have both Gerbtool and CAM350 but would like to get rid of one of them. I much prefer the GUI in Gerbtool as it acts like a Windows app and CAM350's GUI I find is horrible. But that's just my opinion. One nice thing about CAM350 is you can automatically convert all your draws to flashes. The only way I can find to do it in Gerbtool is to select each occurance of a draw and then convert it. It will convert all similar draws. This is too time consuming for me! It need's to be automated! If anyone is using Gerbtool let me know if there is a more automated method of converting draws. But my main concern right now is how PADS deals with flashes.

Derek

[Tom]

Derek,

When you're finished with a PCB deisgn, go to File/CAM/Gerber Layer 1 (Top)/Edit/Device Setup/Regenerate Apertures. This will convert all your Drawn Pads to Flashes on all layers (except pads with copper association).

Try this on your design and bring it into CAM350 and you will see that all the Pads are converted to Flashes.

[drmorgan]

Tom,

I have done this and Gerbtool is still showing that I have draws. I do recall though (now that you mention it) CAM350 seeing only flashes after doing a regenerate. I've got to look into this issue with Gerbtool some more, I would think it should be showing flashes as flashes. Probably operator error somewhere! :-)

thanks Tom