How do you (personally) generate a gerber pack in Altium?

[Graham Gwammy Schwinn]

I have been working with Altium for 7 years now and have kind of gotten stuck in my way of doing things, which I am well aware is inefficient and riddled with places to screw up. My boss (when I started) had a way of doing things based on some weird stuff he encountered in the past, which I made a habit of following. That guy is gone now, and I want to get a fresh perspective on a better way to do it.

I want to know the process you guys go through on a PCB to get all of your gerbers, fab drawings, drill files, etc together and packed up for your board house.

 

[Dan Mills]

Generate ODB++ instead, one file and it has it all, layers, miling, centroid, paste mask, the lot in one convinient zip file that most of the better sort of board house can deal with these days.

Gerber is **SUCH** a pain the arse in comparison, even if the buit in CAM tool in Altium (Camtastic) has the worst user interface ever.

Regards, Dan.

 

[Graham Gwammy Schwinn]

That is where I am at right now. I only ask because when I try to generate a FAB drawing for my current project, Altium thinks the ~3200 holes w/ 11 hole sizes are actually 20k holes in 100+ hole sizes. I have no idea how to walk around it because this is how I've always done it. I've also never seen this behavior before. We also let our support license lapse so I am up a bit of a creek.

I sent ODB++ files off to my board house to see if they have everything they need, so hopefully I can drop this all together.

 

[vetsen]

I use an output job that will create all the PDFs, BOM, gerbers and ODB++ with just a few clicks.

I can then copy that out job file to my subsequent designs. The only gotcha, is making sure that all the layers are selected for output in the gerbers and ODB++ settings.

Not all PCB houses will accept an ODB++. Seems that it hasn't fully caught on yet.

-Vetsen