Photo check & rework

Did every channel cut through? Find the spots that didn't, box them, and re-cut only there, deeper, in one program. The board stays on the machine, and the XY origin is never touched. The drawings are live: press the buttons, and drag on the board.

Find the spots

Look at the board under a light first: a channel that was never cut shows as copper across it. A channel that was cut too shallow looks like any other channel but still joins the two nets, so check with a multimeter: continuity along each net, none between nets. A beep where there shouldn't be one says where to box.

A photo of the board on the bed

A board that has been cut differs from its design: it sits a degree off square, a pad tore, a strand stayed. A photo warped into machine coordinates puts the two in one frame, so a box drawn on the photo lands where the damage actually is, not where the Gerbers say it should be.

1. Take the photo Straight down, evenly lit, sharp. View › Take one with a phone… shows a QR code: scan it, take the photo on the phone, and it arrives in the app. By default it goes through a small hosted relay, so it works on any network (eduroam and mobile data included); set the dialog's Relay field to lan to send it direct instead, if the phone and the PC can reach each other (client-isolating wifi forbids that). The shot is cropped to the copper for you.
2. Lay it on the bed View › Lay a photo of the board on the bed… Click the anchor holes in the photo in the order the design map beside it asks for. Scroll to zoom, drag to pan, and undo the last click if you miss. The note says how well the fit lands. Four holes fit a homography, which straightens a photo that leans as well as one that's turned.
3. Choose the anchors, if you need to By default the app picks four well-spread holes near the corners. On a single-sided board the corner holes can be tiny or hard to tell apart in a photo: View › Choose which holes anchor the photo… lets you pick your own.
4. Look The photo is drawn under the work. Two sliders in the View menu set Photo (how strongly it shows) and Fade the design (how far the copper and toolpaths fade over it): checking a placement and finding a torn pad want them set differently. View › Take the photo off when you're done.

Rework

Select Rework on the rail (under When you need it).

1. What to repeat Repeat from: Isolation traces or Board cut-out (on a double-sided job, Bottom traces or Top traces). The re-cut is that pass as it was cut, clipped to your boxes, so it follows the same route. Set Depth for the next box (0.25 mm to start) deeper than the pass that missed.
2. Mark the spots Tick Drag boxes on the bed and drag a box over each spot; while it's ticked, dragging adds a box instead of moving the board. Each box keeps its own depth; edit it in the table. Level is ticked whenever a height map is on, so that box's cut follows the map; untick it to cut flat.
3. Pro: let the photo find them Propose boxes from the photo walks every channel of the pass and boxes each stretch with no cut in it at all. It needs a photo on the bed, and it can't see a cut that is only too shallow: in any photo that still looks like a channel.
4. Pro: check the depth Probe the boxes over the link taps the map's first point for a datum, then the middle of each box. Where the copper sits lower than the map believed, that box is deepened by exactly the difference: the way to find a cut that is too shallow rather than missing. Tool a couple of millimetres up, spindle off, the clip on the copper; STOP stops it at the next point.
5. Write the file Watch the boxes in 3D… plays only the re-cut. Export the rework program… writes one <name>_<pass>_rework.nc with every box in it, so you send one program. A cut-out rework is taken down in passes, the way the cut-out was cut, not in one deep plunge.