Exporting Drill Holes and Vias Together in KiCAD for UV Laser Engraving and Cutting

As promised in the previous post, here's the video on how to export drill holes and vias together with KiCAD.

The unfortunately thing that caused us having to do this is, for some unknown reasons, when plotting DXF, KiCAD will NOT plot vias, but only drill holes. So, the workaround I found is to export as Gerber drill files, and then open it with KiCAD's GerberView, then export it as a KiCAD PCB file... Then, open the new temp pcb file with KiCAD, and then plot it out as DXF.

Now, the unfortunate side effect of this new "holes and vias" DXF file is that there is no edge cut boundary, simply because Gerber drill files don't have edge cuts. Trouble is... when you import this DXF into programs like XtoolStudio, they are not capable of accepting local origins like regular CAD programs would do. You can only specify the coordinate of the upper left corner of the bounding box. So, unless you like eye-ball alignment, this is not acceptable. What we need is the exact same edge cut lines so the bounding box of the drill and via holes will have exactly the same bounding box as the front copper layer, mask etc. etc. In other words, you must export edge-cut in every layer. If not, you'd have hell of a problem aligning all the various DXF files KiCAD would generate. So, we would just open the new holes.dxf file with LibreCAD, then import the edge-cut DXF in and place it at 0,0.

That's it!


I know, it's a roundabout way of getting it... kind of annoying. Get a feature request of bug report to KiCAD? 




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