Processing pipeline¶

gerber2blend operates on preconfigured pipelines. These pipelines are defined in the blendcfg.yaml configuration file. The following board generation pipeline is created by default:

  STAGES:
    - CLEARSCENE:
    - GERBCONVERT:
    - BOARD:
    - VERSIONSTAMPER:

Each stage in the pipeline is provided from the modules package in the Blender Python environment. For example, GERBCONVERT is defined in the modules/gerbv_convert.py file:

import os
import sys
import shutil

# ...

class GerbConvert(core.module.Module):
    """ Module to convert Gerbers to the required intermediate files
    """
    def execute(self):
        """ Run the module
        """
        fio.rename_gerbers_if_new_names(config.path)
        fio.check_gbr_csv_files_exist(config.path, config.g2b_dir_path)
        # ...

A single Python file can contain multiple stage definitions. A stage must inherit from the core.module.Module base class to be discoverable by gerber2blend. To call a stage from blendcfg.yaml, refer to the stage’s class name in uppercase (GERBCONVERT, in this case) for gerber2blend to dynamically load and run the code defined in the execute method for the class. The execute method for a stage is called when all previous stages are completed successfully.

Available stages¶

• CLEARSCENE - clears the default Blender Scene from any objects

• GERBCONVERT - performs conversion of input Gerber files to SVG/PNG. The input files are taken from the GERBER_FILENAMES configuration section, and the output is stored in the fab/PNG and fab/SVG directories.

• BOARD - generates a PCB model from fab/SVG and fab/PNG input files.

• VERSIONSTAMPER - saves Git commit metadata in the created model (gerber2blend and PCB design repository revision)