How to Creat a Gerber File Using Eagle

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In this Gerber tutorial, I will teach you how to create the files you need for a 2-layer board using Cadsoft Eagle. After you have completed this tutorial you will have all the necessary files needed to send to most PCB manufacturers.

Step 1: Open the CAM Processor
In Eagle, open Board view. Click the “CAM” button or choose “File->CAM Processor”. This will open the CAM Processor tool that is used to generate the files.Here you can define the sections you want to create files for.But you don’t really need to understand this. Actually I have never really thought about the details of this until I was writing this article. I have just been using ready-made configurations. And that is probably what you want to do as well.

Step 2: Open a predefined job
To simplify creating Gerber files, Eagle comes with a predefined job for this. It is called gerb274x.cam.To open it in the CAM Processor click “File->Open->Job…”
Browse to your …/eagle/cam/ folder, and you should see a file called gerb274x.cam. Choose it and click “Open”.You will now see five tabs in the CAM Processor. Each of these tabs will generate a Gerber file.

Step 3: Adding a second silk screen (Optional)
If you look at the tabs, you will see that you don’t have a file for silk screen bottom. For simple boards, the silk screen is usually on the top layer so that you don’t need the bottom. Some of the cheap circuit board manufacturers don’t even allow bottom silk screen.

But if you need silk screen on bottom layer as well, follow these steps:
üClick “Add”
üChange Section to something like “Silk Screen SOL”
üChange File to “%N.pls”
üDeselect all layers
üSelect layers 20 “Dimension”, 22 “bPlace” and 26 “bNames”

There you go.