It has all the features you expect and need to rapidly and easily take your design from conception through to production.
These two utilities can be used to quickly convert between the millimeters and mils, as both units are sometimes used when designing a PCB.AutoTRAX EDA is a powerful multiplatform integrated Electronic Design Suite for Electronic Engineers. After all, PostScript is a quite versatile language! pcb-mm2mil and pcb-mil2mm It's tailored only for PostScript files generated by traxplot and it recognizes and rewrites only PostScript commands generated by it. Why only a part? Because sometimes, when making small boards, I use the same tracing paper up to four times. It inverts whole image or just a part of it (whole halves or just quarters), so the printout can be used with negative photopolymer films. It doesn't operate on a PCB file, but on PostScript (SBL, STL, …) generated by the traxplot utility. Unfortunately, Autotrax doesn't allow to create negative images, so I created this script to do it for me. Because of that, light has to pass through the parts that should be kept on the board as copper, so these parts have to be white. Photoresist most commonly used by me (a photopolymer film) is negative, meaning that it hardens under the light. When using an UV method to develop and etch PCBs (which is my favorite, as it gives me best results), sometimes you'll need a positive image and sometimes a negative one, depending on the photoresist used. It doesn't bother me much, but will be done when I'm sufficiently motivated :) pcb-psinvert Also, it would make numeric sort of indices easier (now they're sorted lexicographically, which makes C10 appear before C5). Designators should be split into type and index (for example, IC3 is type IC and index 3) and components with given type should be grouped together before sorting using values. If you paid attention then you probably noticed a problem with sorting of component designators. Pattern types are stored as regular expressions and are tailored to my needs and component patterns in my libraries (as over the years I've created a few libraries with various component footprints used by me), so you might need to tweak it to suit your needs. If the component pattern doesn't match any which is listed in the script, it will be put last. It puts SMD components first (from smallest to largest), then wire jumpers, and then THT components, from shorest to tallest. Pattern types are defined in the script and sorted in order which is best suitable for soldering. It also sorts them using four keys, in this order:
This tool generates a bill of materials used on the board. = Drill details for drill 4 (1.0 mm / 39 mil) with 3 holes = = Drill details for drill 3 (0.8 mm / 30 mil) with 2 holes = = Drill details for drill 2 (0.7 mm / 28 mil) with 6 holes = = Drill details for drill 1 (0.6 mm / 25 mil) with 28 holes = It loads the PCB file and dumps information about all holes, sorted by drill sizes.
#Autotrax manual
This tool can be used to generate a list useful in manual drilling of the PCBs.
#Autotrax install
This will install the library (pcbfile4 package), which opens and interprets the PCB FILE 4 format, used by Autotrax, and all tools. InstallationĪs all scripts are written in Python 3, you can use this one-liner to install them: My autotrax-tools package aims to fill these gaps. The program is quite easy to learn, very flexible and allows selecting all of its functions and operations from the keyboard (using user-configured shortcuts and macros), its PCB file format is straightforward and very simple (I had no trouble reverse-engineering it for the sake of creating these tools) and traxplot utility (part of the Autotrax package) can be used to export one or more board layers to various formats (including PostScript, which is still used today), but it lacks a few useful functions.
#Autotrax software
It runs perfectly in DOSBox and, despite its mature age (initial release of the program, as Protel PCB, was in 1985, and the software got renamed to Autotrax in 1988), it still can be used to design PCBs. ObjectiveĪutotrax is an old software for MS-DOS, which can be used to design printed circuit boards (PCBs). A set of tools to aid in using DOS Autotrax software.