Questions on Eagle before sending a board off for production.

In my experience, most board houses are good about removing silkscreen that

impinges on pads.

Most of them. Their manufacturing software will automatically look at

places where silkscreen is over top of a pad, and sometimes over top of a

place where there won't be soldermask (tStop/bStop).

Some rough patches I've seen:

- In EAGLE, there is the rectangle tool, which can be used in some

libraries to show the location of pads or just simple rectangles.

Silkscreen rectangles created with this tool can be treated differently by

some older CAM packages, and they will be incapable of removing that

silkscreen automatically. I've had that happen already where there was

silkscreen covering a solderable pad. The board shop did remake the boards

correctly at their expense, but it was still an inconvenience for me.

Simple silkscreen lines and polygons are typically removed more

consistently.

- Other board shops with old CAM software implement an inefficient

workaround: Their workers manually remove all unwanted silkscreen. Manual

processes like this can leave the door open to errors.

Board shops with newer or better CAM software are capable of very

effectively and consistently removing silkscreen from solderable areas,

including rectangles.

Some board fab shops will always send you a checkplot or Gerbers to be

approved before starting any production. You can ask for that on your order

though:

"Please send PDF checkplots  for approval before starting production of this order."

The PDF checkplots I've received from my employer's primary board vendor

are typically PDF format, with one board layer shown per page.

--

Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca.  Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.

In my experience, most board houses are good about removing silkscreen that

impinges on pads.

Most of them. Their manufacturing software will automatically look at

places where silkscreen is over top of a pad, and sometimes over top of a

place where there won't be soldermask (tStop/bStop).

Some rough patches I've seen:

- In EAGLE, there is the rectangle tool, which can be used in some

libraries to show the location of pads or just simple rectangles.

Silkscreen rectangles created with this tool can be treated differently by

some older CAM packages, and they will be incapable of removing that

silkscreen automatically. I've had that happen already where there was

silkscreen covering a solderable pad. The board shop did remake the boards

correctly at their expense, but it was still an inconvenience for me.

Simple silkscreen lines and polygons are typically removed more

consistently.

- Other board shops with old CAM software implement an inefficient

workaround: Their workers manually remove all unwanted silkscreen. Manual

processes like this can leave the door open to errors.

Board shops with newer or better CAM software are capable of very

effectively and consistently removing silkscreen from solderable areas,

including rectangles.

Some board fab shops will always send you a checkplot or Gerbers to be

approved before starting any production. You can ask for that on your order

though:

"Please send PDF checkplots  for approval before starting production of this order."

The PDF checkplots I've received from my employer's primary board vendor

are typically PDF format, with one board layer shown per page.

--

Web access to CadSoft support forums at www.eaglecentral.ca.  Where the CadSoft EAGLE community meets.