Documentation
Visualise geometry

Visualise geometry

Visualising with AppCSXCad

Geometry data can be visualised with AppCSXCad which should come pre-installed with openEMS.

Important

Make sure that you have initialised the virtual environment following these instructions.

Generate your image and geometry files with gerber2ems. 

gerber2ems --convert --geometry

Start AppCSXCad as a bash job. 

AppCSXCad.exe &

Open generated geometry file

Click File > Load and select ./ems/geometry/geometry.xml in the dialog box.

View geometry file

  • Enable/disable visiblity on specific layers.
  • Change to 2D or 3D views.
  • Snap to different planes: [xy, xz, yz].
  • Use MIDDLE_MOUSE to pan.
  • Use LEFT_MOUSE to orbit.
  • Use RIGHT_MOUSE to zoom.
Figure 6. AppCSXCad screenshot

Visualising gerbv images

gerbv is used to convert Gerber files into images. Then nanomesh is used to convert those images into mesh data for openEMS. To view these intermediate image files follow these steps.

Convert Gerber files into image files 

# generate gerbv image files
gerber2ems --convert

# generate geometry data which outputs mesh results from images files using nanomesh
gerber2ems --geometry

View images

All images are located in the specified output folder default: ems.

FilenameDescription
images/{layer}_Cu_not_cropped.pngUncropped images produced by Gerber to image conversion with gerbv.
images/{layer}_Cu.pngCropped images using Python Pillow to fit edge cuts outline.
geometry/{layer}_mesh.pngMesh generated from image using Python nanomesh for importing into openEMS.
Visualise resultsVisualise fields