#85

Those of you who do front panel designs with Adobe Illustrator, what do you do with the files after you’re done? It seems that front panel express and others don’t work with that format.

#86

I use aluminium pcb panels (cost about $12-20 for 10 so about $1 - $2 each). I convert the illustrator or photoshop designs to bitmaps and finish the panel and generate the gerbers in eagle.

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#87

After a little research, it seems that you could, for example :

  • in Illustrator, export your file as a DXF
  • convert the DXF to an HPGL (with Cenon, or Inkscape, or a similar software)
  • import the HPGL into FPE.

I’ve never done this myself, so you’d have to experiment to get sure the results are as intended.

#88

Front Panel Express is a bit of a pain in its specific requirements, and @thom’s solution to import HPGL into it seems sensible.

In general, DXF is a format that panel houses will be fine with. It’s a CAD format, not a graphics format. I belief Illustrator can do DXFs; annoyingly, none of the other illustrator competitors I’ve used other than Inkscape can (and I hate using Inkscape). But I tend to supply DXF as a format.

I also supply mechanical drawings:

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These are not intended for anyobdy to make anything from; instead, they are the unit test for the DXF file - they show what the DXF ought to contain. Indeed, you could make your own panel by following these instructions, and you ought to get what’s in the DXF. Between the two, I cover most eventualities.

(I generate both from Fusion 360; it makes it easy to generate DXF for a surface, and indeed, to make mechanicals out of anything with relatively little effort. I have enough time invested in that tool to make it worthwhile, but wouldn’t recommend it just to get DXFs from a panel).

Another bonus recommendation for Cenon, that thing is a swiss-army knife. (My favourite use of it: adding SVG content to gerber files.)

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#89

Could you say a bit more about this process? Are there PCB fabs which offer aluminium PCBs? I wasn’t aware of that. What are the options for text and graphics?
I went through a period of making quite a few eurorack modules and tended to laser-cut acrylic for panels, but aluminium would be hardier and convenient if already ordering PCBs for circuits.

#90

allpcb and pcbway do them (I prefer allpcb’s ali pcbs). Text and graphics are whatever you like! You can use the copper layer for colour or texture as well, but I tend to just use the soldermask and silkscreen layers and keep it black and white. I make a bitmap in photoshop and then import it into eagle.

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#91

Would you mind to share more detailed (beginner friendly:) process of how you do that or maybe you have an eagle example you ok to share? Sorry if I am asking for too much not sure if it Is appropriate:)

#92

There are loads of eagle examples on my github…

There’s a writeup from Emilie Gillet on the MI forum - have a search for it - that’s a good starting point for using eagle to do panels…

My GitHub:

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#93

Great, thank you very much! Gosh, Emily is like endless source of knowledge.

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#94

Does anyone have experience / suggestions for hand-drawn circuit boards? I typically use Eagle and the straight line tool to draw curved lines with a bunch of segments.

I’d love a tool that would allow me to work with a stylus while maintaining some level of schematic cross-checking. I’m guessing this doesnt exist but perhaps someone has tried this? @infovore’s mention of Cenon feels like it could be part of this process.

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#95

Cenon probably isn’t a fit there - there’s no cross-checking or owt, it just happens to be a vector tool that will export to Gerber. I found it useful for interacting with silking layers, but wouldn’t want to trust it on copper necessarily.

#96

i love that you think your current designs aren’t wiggly enough :slight_smile:

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#97

With a large enough export and import using something like bitmap2component you should be able to do your copper layer in any vector graphics tool setting the correct width/outline as spacing, clear/fill the outline to check spacing, export as high DPI into b2c… Then you can draw using the pen tool or pencil tool to get as squiggly as you like.

Edit: I guess this doesn’t have any checking either

#98

PCBModE ( https://github.com/boldport/pcbmode ) is an option that allows you to layout in Inkscape and export Gerbers, though I’m not sure if it does any cross-checking. It is developed by the people behind Boldport and I believe it is used to design all of their project PCBs: https://boldport.com/shop?category=Soldering+projects

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#99

This seems to be good news for FrontDesign users who prefer or need to draw their designs with other software:

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#100

Only problem with Schaeffer is their prices…
Just got a panel made worth the price of few diy modules.
Top quality i must say.

#101

Can someone explain FPGAs to me? Why are they so popular in music tech (Roland Boutiques, UDO Super 6, dadamachines Doppler)? I’ve read about them but don’t understand how customisable logic gates is really any different to what you do with an MCU

#102

I don’t know if I can give you a comprehensive answer, but in short: with FPGAs you can design your hardware almost as if you were handwiring individual logic gates and with that comes the ability to exactly tailor your hardware to your needs without any abstraction layer. So you can fully control for example the latency of your hardware. With MCUs you aren’t designing hardware but describe the function of your design. This is of course easier but doesn’t give you as much control. Because it will run on a general purpose processor the performance of your programm will be limited by it’s specifications.

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#103

Thank you, that’s a great explanation :slightly_smiling_face:

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#104

Performance benefits from FPGAs typically come from the ability to build massively parallel data pipelines with them. They generally wind up using a lot more chip area and operating at lower clock speeds than “hard” processors, so if you just synthesize an ARM processor or whatever on an FPGA (a “fabric” processor) then it will be much lower performance / clock speed, take more physical space on the silicon and have higher power consumption than a “hard” ARM microprocessor would. However, when using an FPGA for a specific signal processing application you can design a special purpose processor core that processes hundreds or thousands of samples on every clock edge and have a massive performance advantage over doing the same calculation on a general-purpose processor. This is part of why they’re popular for demanding DSP applications.

Another big advantage of FPGAs for certain embedded applications is I/O flexibility. If you have many other chips you need to interface with, especially if they have high speed parallel interfaces, you may have a hard time finding a microcontroller with enough I/O pins and SPI controllers and so on to meet your needs. With an FPGA you can synthesize as many independent peripheral controllers as you can fit in the fabric and can route dozens of I/O pins to chips elsewhere on the board. It’s pretty common now to find FPGAs in mass-market video converters / upscalers because they can easily interface with multiple video-rate ADCs that each have 10 or 12 bit parallel (and sometimes DDR) interfaces. Microcontrollers aren’t really commercially available that can handle this kind of thing. The LVDS capable pins that are common on FPGAs are also quite flexible and can be used for very high speed signalling applications (ethernet, PCIe, etc.) or even for interesting applications like implementing a sigma-delta ADC or DAC using a very simple external circuit.

To play to their strengths it is common for modern / high-end FPGAs to include a dedicated processor core cut into the silicon, like Xilinx’s Zynq system-on-chips that have an ARM processor on the same chip as a bunch of FPGA fabric. These parts will also typically have some other hard cores such as gigabit transceivers designed for ethernet / USB / PCIe / what-have-you – and these are usually general-purpose enough that you can use them for any of the above high-speed peripheral interfaces depending on your application / board layout.

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