Isolation fails but status reports success

[Costin Bobes]

Hi,
With large enough bits and small enough features the isolation fails sometimes, but success is incorrectly reported. Easiest to reproduce is to have a copper-filled board and select large enough bit sizes (example 0.5mm minimum copper clearance and 0.5mm bit). Of course this can happen with smaller bits (running a trace between the pins of an IC). The issue becomes more critical when only few spots have small clearances and visually it is hard to notice that the isolation has actually failed in spots. Using a small bit helps but is not guaranteed to isolate.

[Marius Stanciu]

Hi Costin,

The app reports that it made an isolation successfully not that it did a complete isolation. Any kind of isolation done is an isolation done successfully. So there is no problem with the report itself. Therefore the labeling of this issue as a bug is wrong and I correctly labeled as an enhancement request.

The app has a tool named Optimal Tool. Which when run it will show what is the tool diameter that is the biggest tool that can do a Complete isolation. Use that before doing the isolation and choose a tool that has the diameter smaller or equal to the optimal tool diameter in order to get a complete isolation.
In the next version, the access to a minimal version of this FlatCAM Tool (Optimal Tool) will be done directly in the Isolation Tool (and in NCC Tool).

Best regards,
Marius

[Marius Stanciu]

In any case, I just added for the next version a check in Isolation Tool that will warn the user that he made a bad choice of tools. I still have to make it a choice (expose it as a setting/parameter) since the process is heavy for the bigger Gerber files and some users might not be happy to wait.

[Marius Stanciu]

A feature was added in the latest commits to Beta branch to warn the user if the selected tools are not suitable and the operation was not 100% isolated. It is user configurable because although now it uses multiprocessing therefore running on another processor core, it is still calculation heavy.