Free or Low Cost Tools for:
- PCB Designers (see below)
- Electrical Engineers (see below)
- Product Development: Links to industry insiders
- Cost-Effective Internet Marketing Strategy
- Web Page Authoring
Low cost software for PCB Designers and Electrical Engineers
GCPrevue
GC-Prevueis a great Gerber file viewer for Windows. Our Streamlined PCB Design methods have often used GC-Prevue from Graphicode.

You'll fill out a registration form and then be able to buy and download the latest version.
We have a tutorial for GCPrevue Version 13 on how to make assembly drawings plots from Gerber files.
Legacy GCPrevue version 8
Freeware for PCB Designers and Electrical Engineers
FreeCAD makes a great STEP model Viewer
You can also use FreeCAD for viewing AutoCAD® DXF and DWG drawings
You can use FreeCAD for much more than viewing STEP models. You can get creative with FreeCAD to make 3D STEP models. Altium Designer's on-the-fly 3D model creation is limited. For example, you can't make a toroid for a 3D body using Altium Designer. But you can certainly make one using FreeCAD. FreeCAD is full-featured 3D mechanical drawing software.
It is important to use 3D bodies in Altium Designer with every PCB footprint, because in this way your component clearance checking can be set up to work perfectly. At Golden Gate Graphics, we use a minimum clearance both horizontally and vertically of 11 mils. This value can be adjusted for special cases in your design rules. Because we have a 3D model built into every footprint without exception, Altium's component clearance checking can find clearance errors reliably. This eliminates the need for using IPC courtyards.
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Legacy GCPrevue version 8
If you need upward compatibility for an older, legacy GCPrevue file (DOS version or Windows 95 or 98, which has the extension .pwk instead of the newer .gwk), you can download
legacy GCPrevue Version 8 (gcpvw812.zip - 4.7 Mb) courtesy of Golden Gate Graphics.
We also have a GC-Prevue Version 8 tutorial on how to use the legacy version of this great program. Our
legacy GC-Prevue Version 8 tutorial
also includes how to check for mechanical correctness, organize your Gerber
data and make assembly drawing plots from Gerber files
Golden Gate Graphics resides in Aurora, a suburb of Denver located in the middle of the
Rocky Mountain Front-Range High-Tech Corridor
, which includes the following
Colorado cities from south to north:
Fountain, Colorado Springs, Monument, Palmer Lake, Castle Rock, Highlands Ranch, Centennial, Englewood, Littleton, Denver, Golden, Aurora, Broomfield, Louisville, Lafayette, Boulder, Niwot, Longmont, Loveland, Ft. Collins and Greeley..