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I'm about to send my gerber files to OSH park however I'm having trouble generating the drill file in Altium 14.3. The output file is some other format than the Excellon / NC Drills file that the fab house can use, even when it has the extension *.drl.

Also its worth mentioning that Altium generates 2 files for round and square shapes

So my question is simple

1) Does anyone here know a way to generate a single (eagle like) nc drill file from Altium?

I already tried Altium faq on drill files and OSH park drills guide, however the fab house has already told me they can't process the *.drl file I sent even when I can open it correctly.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Why don't you ask Altium? \$\endgroup\$
    – Leon Heller
    Commented Nov 23, 2014 at 18:34

2 Answers 2

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The Excellon NC drill output file is a .TXT file in Altium. It is in readable ASCII and you can see the tool diameters and positions- it's a variation of G-code used to control CNC machines.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ the only way i can generate txt files, the program intends to force me to generate 2 of them one for circle and other for square shapes, when the fab house can only proccess a single txt file do you happen to know a way around this? \$\endgroup\$
    – GoatZero
    Commented Nov 23, 2014 at 18:01
  • \$\begingroup\$ Do you have some square holes on the board? Drills can only make round holes, so the board shop will have to mill the square holes as a separate operation (and the square holes will have rounded corners). If you require square holes, talk to the board shop to see if they can do what you want, and how they want those holes specified. \$\endgroup\$
    – Peter Bennett
    Commented Nov 23, 2014 at 19:40
  • \$\begingroup\$ @GZeromostro Have you tried enabling G85? There's an option to generate separate drill files for plated and unplated holes. \$\endgroup\$
    – Spehro 'speff' Pefhany
    Commented Nov 23, 2014 at 19:48
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At the end i ended up editing the drill files myself

i could output 2 txt files one for circles and another for squares in order for make themn all squares i just copy /pasted the coordinates from the square file to the circle file , this way i could upload 1 file in the end

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  • \$\begingroup\$ What about the tool number and size? \$\endgroup\$
    – Spehro 'speff' Pefhany
    Commented Nov 23, 2014 at 23:23

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