This page is is part of my embedded system notes.

gerbmerg Notes

Introduction

{introduction goes here}:

Installation

Installation starts with downloading the software. The main web site is currently at:

http://ruggedcircuits.com/gerbmerge/

At the time that I installed the software, it was up to version 1.8. I downloaded from source at:

    mkdir -p {gerbgmerge download directory}
    cd {gerbmerge download directory)
    wget http://ruggedcircuits.com/gerbmerge/gerbmerge-1.8.tar.gz
    gunzip -c gerbmerge-1.8.tar.gz | tar xvf -
    cd gerbmerge-1.8

This creates a gerbmerge-1.8 directory.

There is no README in the top level directory. The documentation is written in HTML and the top level. Using a web browser open the following URL:

file:///{gerbmerg root directory}/gerbmerge-1.8/doc/index.html

The documentation is currently the same as the web site.

The system needs:

Python 2.4 or greater.
On my machine this turned out to be Python 2.6.:
sudo apt-get install python2.6
Python setup tools:

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools

Python SimpleParse 2.1.0 or greater:

sudo apt-get install python-simpleparse

An attempt was make to use the Python installation tools system using:

sudo python setup.py install

Alas, this totally bombed. Somebody else had similar problems and documented them at:

http://karplus4arduino.wordpress.com/tag/gerbmerge/

For me, it was necessary to edit setup.py as follows:

The line:
DestLib = distutils.sysconfig.get_config_var('LIBPYTHON')
did not work. I tried to replace it with:
DestLib = distutils.sysconfig.get_python_lib()
and that did not work either. I eventually had to hard code the correct path for my system as:
DestLib = "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages"
which is obviously not a portable modification to setup.py.

There is a piece of code that looks like:

      fid.write( \
      r"""#!/bin/sh
    python %s/gerbmerge.py/site-packages/gerbmerge/gerbmerge.py $*
      """ % DestDir)

which needs to be replaced with

      fid.write( \
      r"""#!/bin/sh
    python %s/gerbmerge.py $*
      """ % DestDir)

I had never seen raw Python strings before, so I learned something new. I must confess, I replaced the code with:

      fid.write("#!/bin/sh\n" + \
        "python %s/gerbmerge.py $*\n" % DestDir)

which I found to be more readable:

After these two modifications, setup.py worked for me.

Using gerbmerg with KiCAD

gerbmerg is actually a pretty solid piece of software.