Misplace drill holes for FlatCam

[morane]

Hi,

I create a PCB with Eagle in order to mill it with my small CNC.  I need to export the Cam job from Eagle to import it into FlatCam.  The PCB looks ok in FlatCam but the drilling holes are much bigger and they are all outside the PCB.

See the image below.  It's a screen capture of FlatCam where we can see my PCB in the bottom left corner and the holes in the rest of the image. The PCB in green is very small because I wanted to show what the holes looks like. 

I'm new with Eagle and it will be my first PCB with a small CNC.

[morane]

Hi,

I create a PCB with Eagle in order to mill it with my small CNC.  I need to export the Cam job from Eagle to import it into FlatCam.  The PCB looks ok in FlatCam but the drilling holes are much bigger and they are all outside the PCB.

See the image below.  It's a screen capture of FlatCam where we can see my PCB in the bottom left corner and the holes in the rest of the image. The PCB in green is very small because I wanted to show what the holes looks like. 

I'm new with Eagle and it will be my first PCB with a small CNC.

[one-of-the-robs]

If this is an import of the Gerber & Excellon files (exported using Eagle's default CAM job) then it's a known problem with FlatCam. The two file formats are both ancient and terse, and both have some flexibility in format but neither provides a way to declare the encoding. Eagle exports with five decimal places (note that both formats drop the decimal separator) while FlatCam (and some others!) take a guess and get it wrong. For some weird reason, they get only one format wrong - usually the Excellon drill file - and thus end up with the drilled holes ten times further from the origin than they should be.

You should find there's an option to import with different settings to fix this.

[one-of-the-robs]

If this is an import of the Gerber & Excellon files (exported using Eagle's default CAM job) then it's a known problem with FlatCam. The two file formats are both ancient and terse, and both have some flexibility in format but neither provides a way to declare the encoding. Eagle exports with five decimal places (note that both formats drop the decimal separator) while FlatCam (and some others!) take a guess and get it wrong. For some weird reason, they get only one format wrong - usually the Excellon drill file - and thus end up with the drilled holes ten times further from the origin than they should be.

You should find there's an option to import with different settings to fix this.

[m.neujahr_at_moe · Accepted solution]

Hello @morane ,

this looks like an problem with different units in the exported files/while importing the files into FlatCam:

• Please take a look in the gerber files and the drill file (these are simple textfiles)
  The Units used in all files should be the same (imperial mil or inch / metric mm)
• try to change the unit

It seems to be that your Gerber-Files are exported to inch and the drill file to mm or something similar.

Can you change the units while importing the files to FlatCam?

[m.neujahr_at_moe · Accepted solution]

Hello @morane ,

this looks like an problem with different units in the exported files/while importing the files into FlatCam:

• Please take a look in the gerber files and the drill file (these are simple textfiles)
  The Units used in all files should be the same (imperial mil or inch / metric mm)
• try to change the unit

It seems to be that your Gerber-Files are exported to inch and the drill file to mm or something similar.

Can you change the units while importing the files to FlatCam?