Was wondering if anyone know of a program that could give a visual preview of component placing as determined by a pick and place output file, superimposed on an image of the board. Basically something like Alciom SMT Assistant but instead of showing you placement step by step it would draw the outline (presuming the centroid file has dimensions as well as position) as an overlay on the board.
I have a design which is about to be manufactured and the assembly house my client chose is complaining they can’t do a visual preview because my design can’t be imported into Protel (I used DipTrace). Attempts to export from DipTrace into various formats that could possibly be imported into Protel haven’t resulted in anything they can use.
The issue isn’t in the centroid file itself (they can use that for the actual assembly) but in the fact that they can’t do the verification step that they usually do prior to loading the machine. Their explanation is that they have a means to generate a visual preview of placement using Protel and the CSV file, and then inspect that as part of their QA process prior to doing the actual assembly.
I had a hunt around and didn’t find anything that seems to do what I want (basically, read the centroid file exported from DipTrace and draw outlines onto a separately-acquired scan of the board so as to allow for visual inspection).
It isn’t essential to do this but if it’s not done and there are problems with the component placement due to an issue with the exported data itself it leaves the possibility the assembler could claim that it’s partly my fault for using a “non-standard PCB tool” (paraphrased, but that’s the feeling I was given) that they couldn’t run their standard validation tests against.
Alternately if anyone has been successful in bringing a DipTrace layout into Protel I’d appreciate hearing from them.