The PIPE program helps to make printed circuit boards. Scheme, description

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RADIO ELECTRONICS AND ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
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The PIPE program helps to make printed circuit boards. Encyclopedia of radio electronics and electrical engineering

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Encyclopedia of radio electronics and electrical engineering / Ham Radio Technologies

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This article will focus on solving problems related to the lack of support for the Russian language (Cyrillic characters) in CAD P-CAD v4.5 when creating files with extensions *.pcb *.plt, *.psc (PostScript) used in the computer process manufacture of printed circuit boards.

The fact is that when creating *.pcb files, it is often necessary to use Cyrillic characters, for example, to designate the name of a printed circuit board, design document code, radio components and their outputs, etc. Due to the lack of support in the resulting . rsx when viewing and printing, the correct encoding of Cyrillic characters is violated. I covered this in more detail in my article.Converting P-CAD files to graphic formats" in the magazine "Radio", 2002, No. 1, p. 24.

In such situations, the well-known method of so-called transliteration is often used, when the Russian text is written in Latin characters, for example, Plata priemnika. This method is, of course, not very readable. You can also replace broken alphabetic characters with Russian letters when editing .pxx graphic files.

But still, the ideal solution to the problem is to use the PIPE program specially designed for this purpose. This is a vector character generator that supports Cyrillic characters in CAD P-CAD v4.5 when creating pit files. The program also works with P-CAD versions 2.0 and 1.31.

The PIPE program is intended for filter processing of pit-files containing Russian text strings (Draw/Text, Attr commands, etc.), with subsequent use of the result by the system's built-in postprocessors (PC-PLOTS, PC-PRINTS, PC-PHOTO). The idea of processing is that all letters of text strings (both Russian and Latin) are interpreted as sets of vectors corresponding to one or another letter in style. If the user is not satisfied with the font embedded in the PIPE program, it provides the opportunity to write your own or edit an existing one.

When loaded, the PIPE program looks in the pcaddrv sys file looking for the keyword "exe4" and then tries to find an external font (text file vfont.ftn) along the specified path. If not, it uses the embedded font.

It is also possible to specify the width of the vectors as a function of the height of the text string. When loading, the program looks for the h_w.tbl file, similar to looking for an external font.

By default (in the absence of this file) the width is set to zero.

The PIPE program is very compact (29 KB) and consists of a single pipe.exe file. It allows arbitrary placement on the hard disk and therefore can be located anywhere the user desires. The program is a DOS application and is undemanding to computer hardware resources.

The rules for using this program are very simple. To do this, copy the pit file to the directory where the pipe.exe file is located, type the following on the command line: pipe file_name.pit and press the Enter key.

After that, the program starts working. Upon its completion, a file with the same name is formed in the specified directory, but with a different extension - file_name.kir. The figure shows a window with a message displayed by the program after its completion.

PIPE helps PCB fabrication

Then the PC-PLOTS program is launched and the resulting file file_name.kir is loaded into it with the obligatory indication of the kir extension

PIPE Program

Author: A. Goryachkin, Kyshtym, Chelyabinsk Region

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