.:madworm:.'s photos with the keyword: panelization

I really don't know if this panel will ever see the light of day. The boards have MLF10 packages on them, and I'll have to see how assembly goes first! The prototypes were ordered at OSHPARK.

I really don't know if this panel will ever see the light of day. The boards have MLF10 packages on them, and I'll have to see how assembly goes first! The prototypes were ordered at OSHPARK.

KiCad: www.kicad-pcb.org gerbmerge: ruggedcircuits.com/gerbmerge/ I made this a long time ago and never used it. But it shows that simple PCB panelization is doable with open source tools. The routing paths and tabs were added with KiCad, which was a bit of a pain. You have to enter the start / end-points of the sectors in x / y coordinates. Specifying radius and angle is not yet possible. You also need to add '--no-trim-gerber --no-trim-excellon' to the Makefile. Otherwise the routing-paths get chopped off outside the bounding boxes. The option to subtract the solder-mask from the silkscreen (KiCad gerber file creation) unfortunately upsets silkscreen duplication in gerbmerge, so it can't be used. The boardhouse should take care of that.

It's doable for small panels, but gets tedious pretty quickly. Creating a footprint for the mouse-bites helped a bit. It would be really nice if KiCad supported "cloned" copies, so changes to the parent automatically propagate to all children. This panel was ordered at hackvana .