Welcome to gerbonara's documentation!

Gerbonara is a library to read, modify and write PCB manufacturing files such as Gerber, Excellon and IPC-356 through a pythonic API. Gerbonara can open a folder of manufacturing files, and parse file names and metadata to figure out which file contains what. Gerbonara is tested using an extensive library of real-world example files from CAD tools including KiCAD, Altium, Eagle, Allegro, gEDA, Fritzing, Siemens/Mentor Graphics PADS, and Target3001!.

Gerbonara's API is built on two principles:

Meaningful, object-oriented API: Gerbonara abstracts away the details of the underlying file format such as tool indices, coordinate notation and graphical state, and presents meaningful "graphical objects" such as a ~primitives.Line, ~primitives.Arc, or .Region through its API. These objects can be easily created, manipulated or deleted from code without breaking anything else. You can even copy graphical objects between files, and Gerbonara will automatically convert coordinate format, units etc. for you. .GerberFile and .ExcellonFile use the same types of graphic objects <object-api>, so objects can be directly copied between file types without conversion.
Unit-safety: Gerbonara embeds physical .LengthUnit information in all objects. The high-level API such as .LayerStack.merge or .GerberFile.offset accepts arguments with an explicitly given unit and automatically converts them as needed. Objects can be copied between .GerberFile instances and unit conversion will be handled transparently in the background.

Gerbonara was started as an extensive refactoring of the pcb-tools and pcb-tools-extension packages. Both of these have statement-based APIs, that is, they parse input files into one python object for every line in the file. This means that when saving files they can recreate the input file almost byte by byte, but manipulating a file by changing statements without breaking things is hard.

Gerbonara powers gerbolyze, a tool for converting SVG vector graphics files into Gerber, and embedding SVG into existing Gerber files exported from a normal PCB tool for artistic purposes.

Features

File I/O

Gerber, Excellon (drill file), IPC-356 (netlist) read and write

supports file-level operations: offset, rotate, merge for all file types

Modification API (GraphicObject)

Rendering API (GraphicPrimitive)

SVG export

Full aperture macro support, including transformations (offset, rotation)

api-concepts file-api object-api apertures aperture-macros graphic-primitive-api utilities

Quick Start

Development

Gerbonara is developed on Gitlab under the gerbolyze org:

https://gitlab.com/gerbolyze/gerbonara/

A mirror of the repository can be found at:

https://git.jaseg.de/gerbonara

Our issue tracker is also on Gitlab:

https://gitlab.com/gerbolyze/gerbonara/-/issues

With Gebronara, we aim to support as many different format variants as possible. If you have a file that Gerbonara can't open, please file an issue on our issue tracker. Even if Gerbonara can open all your files, for regression testing we are very interested in example files generated by any CAD or CAM tool that is not already on the list of supported tools.

Supported CAD Tools

Compatibility with the output of these CAD tools is tested as part of our test suite using example files generated by these tools. Note that not all of these tools come with default Gerber file naming rules, so YMMV if your Gerbers use some non-standard naming convention.

Allegro

Altium

Diptrace

Eagle

EasyEDA

Fritzing

gEDA

KiCAD

pcb-rnd

Siemens / Mentor Graphics Xpedition

Siemens PADS

Target 3001!

Upverter

Zuken CR-8000

Indices and tables

genindex
modindex
search

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