Eagle pro...what is a gpi file?

[treez]

Hello,

When i use Eagle pro and do the CAM to get the gerbers, it outputs some files ending in ".gpi"
...eg "Top Silk.gpi" , "Top copper.gpi"

Do you know what is the .gpi file?

Can the .gpi file be used as an ASCII file , os as a ODB++ file?

 

[keith1200rs]

The answer is the same as last time you asked it:

https://www.edaboard.com/threads/276056/

Keith

 

[treez]

Yes thanks i was aware of your previous kind answer....thing is, i suspect that this .gpi file contains the plotting info that our PCB house has been continuously asking for.

I read on the web that .gpi stands for "gerber plotting information"................and that is exactly what the PCB house has been asking us for.........though they called it "ASCII files".

So do you think that this .gpi file is good to send to the PCB hose in place of the ASCII file?

 

[keith1200rs]

There is no harm in sending it to them. The information shouldn't be required unless you are not using extended Gerber (but then you should also be generating a "wheel file"). I would suggest you always use extended Gerber (RS274X).

Keith

 

[treez]

Thanks, as you know, i have been trying unsucesfully to get these "ASCII" files to the PCB house, and so my boss got me to send the Eagle Pro .brd and .sch files to a Professional PCB layout Engineer to see if he could extract the ASCII files .

This particular layout engineer charges much higher pay reates than me, and he uses Altium.

He managed to run some kind of ULP in eagle and produced an excel file which he sent us -it had like component rotation information on it and other stuff -he said he thought it would suffice in place of the ASCII file, but said it was "crude".

His final words were "it's crude but then so is Eagle".

-what did he mean by this? -is he just wanting to denegrate Eagle becasue he fears that Eagle users (such as myself) may compete with him for payed PCB layout work?

 

[keith1200rs]

I don't know what the ASCII files are that your PCB house wants. I have had maybe 100 PCBs made with Eagle over the last 12 years or so (and dozens more with other software prior to that) and have never had anyone asking for "ASCII" files. If you could get your PCB house to tell you what information the ASCII file needs to contain then I suspect it can be produced by Eagle. Usually, if there isn't an inbuilt function for something and Eagle don't supply a ULP for it, someone will probably have written a ULP for it.

Keith