How to: Altium Circuit Maker PCB to OSH-Park

How to export PCB design from the free Altium Circuit Maker v1.0.4 so that it can be submitted to OSH Park fab. This took me an evening to figure out; OSH Park service was bitching about missing “outline” and/or drill files.

The recipe:

  1. Draw the outline of your board into the “Outline” layer of the PCB. This is not done automatically by the software!
  2. Use the icon “Gerber” on the Tools page of the ribbon strip to generate a ZIP file containing all layers. The following pictures document a working setting for a 2-layer board: circmaker-gerb-1circmaker-gerb-2circmaker-gerb-3circmaker-gerb-4
  3. Circuit Maker will generate a ZIP file containing the Gerber layers named YOUR_PROJECT_Gerber.zip
  4. Using the icon Drill on the Tools ribbon generate an NC-Drill zip file. The following picture documents setting on the dialogue window that pops up: circmaker-ncdrill-1
  5. Circuit Maker will generate a ZIP file containing the drill file named YOUR_PROJECT_NC_Drill.zip
  6. Go inside your Gerber ZIP file and rename the XX.Outline file to XX.GKO (where XX is the name of your PCB).
  7. Extract the XX.TXT file from your NC_Drill ZIP and put it inside your Gerber ZIP file; this file contains the drill data.
  8. Upload your modified Gerber ZIP file to OSH-Park service…

NOTE: If you skip Step #6 and do not rename .Outline to .GKO then OSH-Park will reject your ZIP file with an incorrect error message “Drill file not found” (or similar) - this is a misleading error message.

This is a preview of my latest board that I designed using Circuit Maker. It is now in production at OSH Park:

oshpark-pmod_stm32_eth-preview