Hello All,
Please move this thread if it's in the wrong location, or if there would be a better location.

So it's been a long time since I've used eagle to make a board, but looking over those that I've made in the past I just can't find one that had similar issues with isolation and the ground plane. I have tried many many variations of wire width, polygon spacing and polygon isolation. Along with of course many variations of pcb gcode multi pass min, max and step. I'm using a 30° V bit with a 0.1mm tip. Please help me get rid of these strange lines around the pads. If I make them better by tweaking the ground plane polygon settings it ends up breaking the ground plane to where some components are no longer in contact with it.




Thank you,
John

 

I believe that this is not a problem with Eagle. I presume that you must be using another piece of software that converts the eagle gerber file to gcode engraving file.

 

I believe that this is not a problem with Eagle. I presume that you must be using another piece of software that converts the eagle gerber file to gcode engraving file.

You are correct. It's a ULP called PCB-GCode (like in the title of this post). I know it's not a problem with eagle, I'm asking what I'm doing wrong with the ground plane and or PCB-GCode settings. Thank you.

Best,
John

 

Which version of eagle and PCBgcode are you using?

 

Which version of eagle and PCBgcode are you using?

Eagle version 7.6.0. I did install the newest version 9.6.2 but I didn't care for it and it kept crashing so I removed it. I'm using 7.6.0 with ULP pcb-gcode-3_6_0_4.

**edit**
Day two... After some more fooling around with the ground plane I've come up with a result that I think I'll be happy with. I'll cut this again later today and see how it turns out. Screen shots of settings and output result is below. In this project all of my route thickness' are 1.27. Please let me know if you see anything I could adjust to make a better outcome.

Thank you.

ground plane properties

 

In PCBgcode you have 'etching tool size' set to 0.1mm. When you are using the 'V' bits, the cutting width depends on the cutting depth. There are calculators to get the width based on the depth. You don't show the PCBgcode page with the widths.

 

In PCBgcode you have 'etching tool size' set to 0.1mm.... You don't show the PCBgcode page with the widths...

Hey Albert,
Thanks for getting back to me. There isn't a widths tab, but on the machine tab I have Z-Depth set to -0.09. In addition I have figured out what some of those strange isolations are... they're thermals! They're just odd looking I guess due to the wire/isolation size set in the ground plane section. These I have circled in Red in the pic below.

I have set up four copies of this board with slightly different settings to compare the outcomes.

At this point what I'd same I'm least happy with are the sections circled in Green. These are strange isolations, but I suspect also related to ground plane wire and isolation settings.

 

See https://hobbycnc.com/tool-width-calculator/
For your numbers this gives a width of cut 0.15mm.

 

Hey Albert. I love this calculator, thank you! So I figured out what the problem was. It was the wire thickness and isolation combo on the ground plane. Playing around with these settings I noticed the most difference. Fooling around with the cutting tool and other settings in pcb-gcode just didn't get me where I wanted to be.

I have a finished product and though I'm happy with it... yeah there's room for improvement. I want to rearrange the components a bit and add an on/off switch. So what is it? A kiln thermometer for my propane forge. I've been running it on the arduino for nearly two years now. lol. Finally started having issues with connections in a mini bread board. So now it's rock solid and I get my arduino board back!

I've bookmarked the link. Thanks again Albert.

Best,
John