Its been a lot of years but I couldn’t get the IDF format to work. It may have had something to do with how the PCB components library was setup. It was old and came from PCAD I think, not sure it was setup cleanly.
@laukejas Are you by chance on a 4K monitor? If so, there is a bug with the Sketch picture that I filed an SR on late last year. Turns out when Ditmars wrote it (and I definitioned it) 4K monitors didn’t exist and now that they do, it didn’t take into account 4K, so that’s why it is scaling out. They should have a fix for it in 2027?
Also, my probelm with it is if the scale widget is within the actual graphic, you can’t select it which becomes super annoying! Workaround is to scale the graphic down first so that the widget is outside the graphics area and then place the scale widget’s left and right points.
If you are done with the sketch picture in your part, you can suppress just the sketch picture and your zoom out problem should go away.
I use EasyEDA and love it and the user community library of components is great! Imports DXF nicely from SW.
Mark
Yeah, I’m on a 4k monitor. Didn’t even think it could be related… Thank you for these tips. I actually went with decals for these PCB pictures. Decals are not without their own set of issues, but slightly more convenient.
I actually do it the other way around - design the PCB in EasyEDA (outline included), and then export it to SW. .obj export is unfortunately crap, as is .png export (very low quality), so my workflow is:
- Export bottom layer as SVG;
- Export top layer as SVG;
- Use online utility to convert SVG to PNG;
- Use paint.NET to trim both images, save to separate files;
- Add decal in SW, set up all the settings to get it in the right orientation and scale, repeat for the other side;
- Modify board outline sketch to match the decals;
- Place/move components into the right positions based on these decals.
If anything changes, I have to repeat all these steps except the last - instead, I have to close all the documents that reference the part with the decals and reopen that part, because that’s the only way to get decals to update.
Super inconvenient, especially when design needs to be updated 20 times a day. And I can’t think of any way to meaningfully automate it. Did you discover any ways?
My process with easyEDA is as follows:
- Export DXF with two drawing sheets, one for “board outline” and another for “Document” (to show components and keepouts).
- import into easyEDA to those respective layers
- Do my board layout in easyEDA
- Export 2D (top and bottom side) .png from easyEDA (actually just take a Windows screen grab of it)
- paste into new document in Photoshop
- remove background etc. as as .png
- Back in SW, apply it as sketch picture .png from PS on the top (and bottom) side of the PCB.
This verifies that it is round-tripped to see that I have all the proper placements done in easyEDA (because I typically do some minor re-placement of components) before I Gerber the board for fab.