How to export PCB to Gerbers or other fabrication formats

[danyhm]

Hello,

First of all, thank you very much for this utility. It's been a long time since I've been looking for a CLI tool to do some Altium automation, but I could only find Kibot, which is KiCad-centric. KiBot handles Altium files via weird virtual desktop methods, where it launches KiCad and auto-clicks the menus to handle the export. Not so clean and very buggy.

My ultimate goal is to export a PCBDoc file to Gerber using Altium-specific properties (like which layers to export, NC Drill settings etc) without having Altium installed and preferably on Linux for automation purposes.
I can see your tool already has a great deal of commands, but I could not figure out if what I want to do is possible.

Normally, generating Gerber is done via outJob files (cleanest method) in Altium. where I create a project and add the PCBDoc to that project, add an OutJob file, and then add my desired fabrication outputs and click generate.

Is it possible to do this with your tool? If yes, how?
if no, can you please add this feature?

[akiselev]

That is definitely on the roadmap but not currently implemented. Once the v1 to v2 refactoring is done I'll see if I can do that next. Should be relatively easy to implement, but I wouldn't use it for real fab runs untils it been battle tested (although theoretically I should be able to make a bunch of test cases that compare open source gerber files against altium-cli's output)

[danyhm]

That's great. I with this coupd be Bumped.

From what I understand KiCad imports the PCB into its own format and then generates gerber using its own engine which migh cause some details to be lost (not sure by the way).

However Altium has its own engine for gerber and other outputs. Running those requires either reversing the binaries which i believe it to be hard in this case. Or rather use those binaries just like altium and generate the output. On the latter case the generated content should be exactly the same as running altium and generating the files manually.

Such a pitty altium SDK doesn't provide this

[akiselev]

Yeah I think it'll take a while before the gerber engine I add will be ready for production given all the different little PCB features Altium support. If the Altium gerber generator is in Delphi (probably) it'll be difficult to reverse engineer but not impossible. I should at least be able to create a list of features that I need to test against, but a lot of the PCB features are esoteric that few if any open source projects use, so I might not have enough test cases unless someone submits them.