Irregular board outline

[ghersschens]

Hi,

I'm having a problem with an irregular board shape. The initial board was a simple rectangle and everything seemed fine. The board is for a DC motor speed controller. Then I added 2 small boards for the tachometer to the original board (basically to save cost on the PCB manufacturing). The Tacho boards have a round-ish cut-out on 2 opposite corners for the mounting screws of the motor, a hole in the middle for the motor shaft and 2 mounting holes to attach the tacho PCB to the motor housing. I extended the original PCB design with those 2 tacho boards, removed redundand parts of the original outline and connected the outline of the tacho boards to the outline of the original board. Then I added milling slots ans mousebite holes to be able to break off the tacho boards from the main board.

In the Eagle board design everything looks OK, but when I select the manufacturing viewer, it doesn't seem to find the new board outline. When I export the gerber files to JLCPCB's site and use their gerber viewer,I get the same problem. What am I doing wrong?

PS: I tried outline and polygon for the milling slots as I'm not sure which is the correct way for the PCB house.

[one-of-the-robs · Accepted solution]

If you're using V9 then I'd say Eagle isn't identifying the board outline either, as the background is black. The not-board background should be grey. So there's probably no mystery, it's just not a valid outline. It must be continuous with no overlap or gaps.

[ghersschens]

Thanks for the reply. You were right, the outline was not a closed contour. I fixed it by extending the size of the original board and milling away the unwanted parts.

Would be nice if Eagle had a feature to pinpoint gaps in a contour which should be a closed one (similar to ERC/DRC). Or a setting to snap end points of a line to the nearest point on a line on the same layer. It's not easy to spot the flaws if the gap is just a fraction of a millimeter wide.

Rgds,

Gilbert