Flip Gerber files...?

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) General Bar Sport
1

Anyone know an easy way to flip an entire PCB?

I designed a board in Fritzing and stupidly got the orientation of the thing wrong. It needs to be a horizontal mirror of what I have. :frowning: Is there anything I can use to take the exported Gerber files and flip them? Or am I going to have to do this damn thing again?

Feel like such a mook right now.

2

Don't worry, you're certainly not the first person to do that!

I don't know specifically about in Fritzing, but depending on how you'll be fabricating the actual board you may be able to fix it after generating the artwork. Are you going to fab these boards yourself or send the Gerbers off to a commercial fab house? If you're doing something like optical transfer or the "iron the toner onto the board" technique it's just a matter of flipping the graphic in a paint program after generating it.

Jon
Freetronics: www.freetronics.com

3

Try adding the following line near the top of the Gerber file (amongst other lines that look similar):

%MIA1B1*%

That should serve to mirror-image the Gerber file. Confirm with a Gerber viewer like GC-Prevue.

--
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4

I was going to send them off to someone like BatchPCB or PCB Pool.

I checked and double checked but it wasn't until I printed the thing off to check some sizing etc. that I could blatantly tell it was the wrong way round. Ack! Lol.

Cheers Rugged, I'll give that a whirl... though I suppose I should probably re-do the Fritzing file anyway since no doubt I'll make changes to the circuit one day, re-export and forget it was backward.