Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Eagle DRC "Stop MAsk error", layer 29 (tStop)

Status
Not open for further replies.

earckens

Member
Out of the blue after multiple checks, and with always .sch and .brd open at the same time I get these "Stop Mask" errors where funny little marks appear in the stop mask (top and bottom) of several components leading to these errors.
These marks are not present in the part in the library and only appear after a DRC is done on the newly opened file.
Would anyone please want to have a look at this? I am baffled.

In the .rar attachment you find the library file, the schematic and the board file.

Erik
 

Attachments

  • decoderP3-v2.brd
    70.9 KB · Views: 244
  • decoderP3-v2.rar
    38.4 KB · Views: 228
I've never seen that error before. Some quick looking shows the error occurs any place the silk screen layer intersects holes (i.e., pads) in the soldermask. This isn't a problem for making a successful board, as issues like this get taken care of in the process - you'll never see silkscreen across a pad, but it will affect how the board looks - Read an important comment below.

This illustration shows one of the errors.

Stop layer error 1.jpg


One this to note in this illustration - the blue cross-hatching is the Tstop layer. "Fixing" these errors is pretty simple. Don't display the Tstop and Bstop layers. This is why I've never seen it before. The illustration below shows the same area with the Tstop layer turned off - no more errors.

Stop layer error 2.jpg


One real problem I did notice - all of your fonts are "proportional" - proportional fonts do not reproduce properly in Gerber files. Typically, they are too long and don't show up as expected. Change any labels that will be on the silkscreen to Vector - then what-you-see-is-what-you-get. You can do this easily by grouping everything, and changing font properties all at once.

Hmmm... maybe this has been fixed in version 7. The picture below is the board as it looks in Eagle. The second is the Gerber silkscreen layer.

Eagle Proportional fonts 2.jpg


Eagle Proportional Fonts.png
 
Hi JonSea, I use Eagle 7.6.0
Good to learn I need to convert to vector font; I will try and find the reason why it is not in vector, and how to cenvert it to vector (possibly wwith a script?).
I see the silkscreen does not include names or values; I am planning to include those in the silkscreen.
Indeed with the tStop and bStop turned of no errors: does this in any way affect the pcb manufacturer if tStop and bStop are included in the gerber?
And if the tNames and tValues are included with the 21 layer for the sikscreen?

And most important: why do these errors show up? They also do in places where the silkscreen does not interfere with holes or pads.

I will be off a few days, we were on vacation in Southern France and my missus wants us on our return tomorrow to have a stopover in the Champagne region, to get some boxes for the end of year festivities. Hopefully sober back by Monday.

Erik
 
When you turn a layer "off", you're only controlling whether you see it on the screen. When I opened your bed file, every layer was turned on...maybe you toggled all layers on to cause this "error" to show up. I used the default DRC and I saw only about 5 errors, which all went away when the tStop layer was off.

To include values in the silkscreen layer, you need to enable the tValues layer in the silkscreen layer in the Gerber CAM job. Whatever layers are ticked will be included in the Gerber layer. I'll post a picture shortly.
 
I will be off a few days, we were on vacation in Southern France and my missus wants us on our return tomorrow to have a stopover in the Champagne region, to get some boxes for the end of year festivities.

Life is hell for some people.:joyful:

spec
 
I use version 5-something of layout - the pro version to get the board sizes I need. Too $$$ to upgrade.
 
I use version 6-something for layout - the pro version to get the board sizes I need. Too $$$ to upgrade.
 
Life is hell for some people.:joyful:

spec
Right, back from hell. Last night we had a champagne tasting, we got "somewhat" drunk; good thing about this stuff is that you do not get a hangover, headache or bad taste the next morning. So this morning we did set off right away to another two houses and had another six or seven tastings, luckily we had had breakfast. You have to take it while you can :D. (PS, just for the record: we normally drink at most one glass a day :angelic:).

So, sober again, and I just converted all text to vector, problem solved except for 3 obvious stop mask errors: the ones JonSea did show in post 2.

JonSea, I owe you a bottle of champagne, if you get around to fetch it here; thank you very much!

Erik
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top