Hello.? I have been working with eagle and gcode since 2010. My pcb-making-machine setup is an old CNC machine from the soviet era with a big communist three-rack-sized mainframe (PDP11 clone) which I modified to load g-code from 9-track tapes and no longer from punched cards.
On desktop side everything works perfect with this setup: some ancient PC running FreeBSD/amd64 + wine + eagle6.4 + pcb-gcode "release alpha 316" (on the same green CRT display but I prefer to VNC from a normal computer). I optimize the passes (sort the tool path for making board) using pcb-gcode-wizard (version 101/April 2012) and sort/optimize the top and bottom g-code files.? Then I transfer three resulting files on three different 9-track tapes:? top, bottom and bottom drill.? I load each tape into its own reel-to-reel drive then I start the system. I have to turn the board on the other side when top milling process is finished, then I manually change the drills when the system asks me to.
?? However I am unable to "re-paint" (modify) the resulting g-code and the dinosaur shows only numbers on the screen - nothing is graphic. Sometimes (rarely) I have to make manual corrections on the resulting boards by using a scalpel. I built many complicated boards using this ancient setup - the last one is a replacement for one of my ancient tape drives:? https://hackaday.io/project/133859-the-pertec-whisperer-mainframe-tape-drive-emulator
Today I discovered the latest version of pcb-gcode and surprise - the author programed a viewer (thank you!!!!).? Because my setup is a little weird, the viewer does not start. I modified the pcb-gcode.ulp so it should always run the viewer.exe no matter of which OS it detects.? I also tried to manually start the viewer but it says "file not found". It generates the files, I load them on tape, install them, wake up the dinosaur and everything works as usual. However I am still not able to turn on the viewer.? From what I understand while looking into pcb-gcode.ulp:? the viewer starts after the board is made.? So if the board is complicated ('wine' always uses a single CPU core no matter how many cores are active) - sometimes the viewer should start after half an hour (I tested with the mainboard from the link above).
So:? is there any way to run the viewer on a pre-existing (set of) g-code file(s)? for example:? viewer.exe mainboard.ngc
Please advise.
