4 Frame Objects

A production panel normally has a set of process related objects in the panel frame (margin). These objects might include tooling holes, fiducial marks, targets, texts, bar codes and more.

Macaos RapidCam supports several object types, and a wide variety of parameters for placing these objects. Frame objects may be placed on a specific layer, or assigned to a set of related layers (such as copper inner upper side). Frame object locations may be anchored to panel corners or panel edge midpoints. One, two or four objects may be symmetrically placed with a single object definition.

Supported object types:

Drill hole

Drill text

a text drilled with a 5x7 dot matrix for each character. The character size is determined by the hole diameter.

Text

Bar code

in Code128 format or Datamatrix format

Layer number

a set of staggered copper layer numbers

Target

a Circle, Square, Hexagon, Octagon, Rectangle, Oval, Triangle, Donut, Box or Moire

User shape

may be any shape, defined as an Extended Gerber aperture macro. A number of pre-defined user shapes are available for selection from a context menu.

A number of system variables are supported for texts, drill texts and bar codes. These include: Batch name, Batch quantity, Layer code, Date (and date fragments), Frame size, User name and Copper coverage.

Although frame objects are defined together with fixed-size panels, it is possible for a fixed-size panel to use the frame object set from a different panel definition.

Setting up your first panel frame can be a fairly complex process. Macaos RapidCam comes with a few example frames that you may use or modify as you desire. Our support team will gladly help you set up a panel frame based on a set of actual production Gerber files, if necessary.