You can see that the parameters let you set space between the boards, number of boards in the grid, width of the tabs, tab dimensions, number of tabs between boards, and even the radius of the curve where the tabs meet the board. These settings were pulled from the examples page, which demonstrates outcomes for many different settings options.
When you start panelizing such a board however, the whole concept breaks. You mess around with Edge.Cuts, (mousebites etc.) and the different zones with the same net are just merged into a single zone by KiCad. So you have to carefully manage the zone outlines yourself.
Panelizing Boards In KiCad
I have had JLCPCB make panels of 15mm x 10mm boards.With JLCPCB if you specify edge rails you can combine the width of these with increasing the number of boards on the panel until you reach the minimum size required. This does not affect the overall cost of the panel by much.
JLC: They would not assemble boards with V-groves. My boards were too small to assemble. One engineer told me to put a row of holes between the small boards and get them assembled as one then saw them apart when I get them. When I sent the files a different engineer told me they can not allow small boards (paneled).
Writing a file for each panel would be laborious, so instead, KiKit comes with the concept of configuration composition. Basically, you start with a default configuration and then the files can override specific parameters of the sections. This allows you to, e.g., create a file jlcpcb_mousebites.json that has the right drill size and just use it: kikit panelize -p jlcpcb_mousebites.json -p myPNPmachineFraming.json myBoard.kicad_pcb panel.kicad_pcb.
This step is weird. You need to change the extension of all .gm1 files to .gko. For this example, flail-tx-kicad-Edge_Cuts.gm1 needs to be renamed to flail-tx-kicad-Edge_Cuts.gko as this is what GerberPanelizer expects. Here is my resulting directory:
Some customers would like to merge more than 1 PCB in the same Gerber. We know you want to save money but this may make it hard to cut the board outline and more importantly, this will take a lot more time to pick up and package the PCB. Although by doing this, you just have the one order, this complicates the fabrication of the panel and separation of the individual PCBs, so we will usually charge more for this. Similarly, using holes or slots as break off sections between boards are treated the same way as putting more than one design on a panel, each with its' own board outline.
The goal is a separate design, a panel comprising a horizontal row of my boards separated by the 100 mil routing width that my fab uses. The purpose is a panel that is an easily handled batch during assembly (solder paste stenciling, placing SMD components, and moving to the reflow oven.)
I want to take advantage of the entire 5cmx5cm given to me by places like DirtyPCBs and Elecrow so i want to design multiple separate PCBs on kicad and then combine them onto one board (like shown in the "panelizing" section of this FAQ page) with this type of breakable tab (slots or mouse bites) as shown in this image from DirtyPCBs. I just started to learn how to design boards with kicad and so far all i have designed is a 777 timer LED blinker and a bluetooh module breakout. I ordered these designs already from OSHPark for one and Elecrow for the other but I want to try and combine the completely separate PCBs onto a single one and add the breakable slots.
When simply sharing space for efficient manufacturing, the process is largely transparent to the board designer. However, there are other instances where panelization must be given more thought. First of all, if a board is to be assembled by automated machinery, using a (still) panelized array of boards can speed up the process. It can also facilitate alignment via extra border space left on the perimeter of the array. It also makes automatic assembly of very small boards possible.
The excellent tutorials of spaceagerobotics and Ches Koblents made it a lot easier for me to use Kicad together with gerbmerge to panelize a few printed circuit boards which I wanted to submit to Seeed Studio. While the tutorial worked fine using the supplied test files my Kicad files did not work. The reason was, that I designed my PCBs with metric units. Furtunately I found a fork of the original gerbmerge program which included metric support already. However, still my Kicad files did not work.
According to spaceagerobotics Seeed requires an outline for the entire panel to be present on all layers, otherwise, they will offer to change your order for multiple, separate boards, which defeats the entire purpose. Therefore, his patch is included in my fork of gerbmerge already.If you are interested how this is achieved then have a look at the diff file of these patches to the config.py and gerbmerge.py files.
5) The v-cut line must be zero pitch between sub-boards. The width of the v-cut is around 0.4mm; please leave at least 0.4 mm spacing between the center of the v-cut line and any copper features.
With the price of professionally made printed circuit boards rapidly dropping, hobbyists electronic design became much more popular. As a result, KiCad started gaining significant traction and a larger developer base.
panelize.py is a tool I created a long time agoto panelize one of my kicad PCBs.Version 3 is a complete rewrite which supports kicad format 4 and 5 PCB files,those with the ending ".kicad_pcb".It can copy and optionally rotate and flip parts of PCB files.It can also be used to merge multiple PCB files.When PCBs are copied onto a "frame" PCB or prepared empty panel, the process can berepeated as often as needed.If changes are made to a source PCB the panelized PCB just has to be reassembled from all parts.
When using pcbnew directly or within a project it is possible to cut and paste, sections or whole boards. (this includes the append board feature) After pasting the copied selection the newly pasted pads, traces and via loose all net information. This means it is impossible to copy an existing design and retain connections especially to fill zones when using the newly added stand alone via feature. As the new via do not have the net information and the zones also don't have net information they all do not connect to zones that they were connecting to before copying.
Kicad Version:Application: kicadVersion: 5.0.0-rc2-dev-unknown-31e78d662ubuntu16.04.1, release buildLibraries: wxWidgets 3.0.2 libcurl/7.47.0 OpenSSL/1.0.2g zlib/1.2.8 libidn/1.32 librtmp/2.3Platform: Linux 4.4.0-112-generic x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTKBuild Info: wxWidgets: 3.0.2 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 2.24 Boost: 1.58.0 Curl: 7.47.0 Compiler: GCC 5.4.0 with C++ ABI 1009Build settings: USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF USE_WX_OVERLAY=OFF KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON KICAD_USE_OCE=ON KICAD_SPICE=ON
Additionally I do not care how "unsafe" that feature is, because cut and pasting is unsafe in general. Unless you are willing to actually add proper panelization support in KiCad (that is really a major missing feature at the moment) it is much more dangerous that a copy of a design is not electrically equivalent to the copied version. The loss of net information leads to the copper fills changing which is much more dangerous than removing the net information, as it can lead to broken panels. I almost ordered broken panels because of this, I am glad I review my boards very carefully and I caught the fact that all my via stitching was not connecting to copper fills suddenly.
I do care because corporate users like me will not accept a board layouttool that breaks their boards due to invalid or duplicate netdefinitions when copying board objects that cause net definition issue.I have little interest in turning kicad into a panelization tool. Ifusers want to use it as a panelization tool that is fine but I willalways opt for board layout integrity over panelization support every time.
On 3/2/2018 4:22 PM, Piotr Esden-Tempski wrote:> I like the paste special solution of Altium for this. On the other hand> loosing the net information when using append board is definitely a> regression. I am pretty sure that this feature was working before.>> Additionally I do not care how "unsafe" that feature is, because cut and> pasting is unsafe in general. Unless you are willing to actually add> proper panelization support in KiCad (that is really a major missing> feature at the moment) it is much more dangerous that a copy of a design> is not electrically equivalent to the copied version. The loss of net> information leads to the copper fills changing which is much more> dangerous than removing the net information, as it can lead to broken> panels. I almost ordered broken panels because of this, I am glad I> review my boards very carefully and I caught the fact that all my via> stitching was not connecting to copper fills suddenly.>
I would just hope to see a way of being able to safely cut and paste as well as append boards and keep the electrical equivalency of the original. The current behavior is not intuitive if you ask me. I was not expecting that the stuff I pasted will not be the same thing that I have cut. "Create Array" is behaving more like one would expect. But I think there are a few ways of approaching this.
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