A nerd snipe, in which I learn to read gerber files
So, I had the realisation last night that the biggest sunk cost with getting a PCB made in China is the shipping. The boards are about 50 cents each, and then its $25 for shipping (US dollars of course). I should therefore be packing as many boards into a single order as possible to reduce the shipping cost per board. I have a couple of boards on the trot at the moment, my RFID attendance tracker project (called GangScan), and I've just decided to actually get my numitrons working and whipped up a quick break out board for those. You'll see more about that one later I'm sure. I decided to ask my friends in Canberra if they needed any boards made, and one friend presented with a set of Gerber CAM files and nothing else. That's a pain because I need to know the dimensions of the board for the quoting system. Of course, I couldn't find a tool to do extract that for me with a couple of minutes of Googling, so... I decided to just learn to read the file format. Gerber is well specified, with a quite nice specification available online. So it wasn't too hard…