Re: Re: Hobbyists strike again

hansw wrote:

> As far as drilling, PIA exports Excellon drill files, they look a lot
> like g-code except the measurements are not in decimal inches.
> Here's a sample of Excellon
> M48
> INCH,LZ
> T01F00S00C0.037
> %
> G90
> T01
> X+05188Y+02901
> X+04588Y+02901
> May be there's a way to use these directly with a regular g-code driven
> mill,

Well, there are many variants of G-code. Excellon IS, in fact, a
permissible variant of RS-274D. It is no decimal point, TRAILING
zero suppressed, and with a drilling canned cycle active.

And, just to keep things interesting, the Gerber plot files are
ALSO RS-274D, but no decimal point, LEADING zero suppressed,
and using D01, D02, D03 for move, flash and draw functions.

Both of these are archaic, obsolete forms of G code. But, once you've
built a general purpose interpreter for these forms, it is pretty easy
to write format converters and similar things.

Jon