PANELIZING BOARDS THE simple method

For reasons that will stay concealed up until a long time in the future, I just recently had a requirement to panelize a few PCBs. Panelization is the art of taking PCB styles you already have, whether they’re KiCad board files, Eagle board files, or just Gerbers, as well as turning them into a single collection of PCBs that can be sent off to a fabulous house.

Now this is panel racing
If you’re still wondering what this means, take a look at the last board you got from OSH Park, Seeed, Itead, or filthy PCBs. around the perimeter of your board, you’ll discover some rough spots. These are ‘mouse bites’ as well as tabs, locations where the boards are strung together to type a gigantic rectangular panel sent off to a manufacturer. You can inspect out this excellent interview with [Laen] from OSH Park to get an concept of exactly how this works, however the fundamental process is to take a lot of Gerbers, add tabs as well as mouse bites, solve the knapsack problem, as well as send the completed panel off to a board house.

Panelizing boards is something most of us won’t have to do often. Really, you only want a panel of boards when you’re producing something. For small-scale production as well as prototypes, bare boards will do just fine. just by virtue of the truth that panelizing boards is far less typical than throwing some Gerbers at OSH Park or Seeed, there aren’t many (good) tutorials, as well as even fewer (good) tools to do so. This is exactly how you panelize boards quickly as well as quickly utilizing open source tools.

What I want
The DEF con 24 badge, in a panel
Panelizing boards, or putting several copies of a board in a single Gerber file, is nothing new. We’ve seen it performed in Eagle with a ULP script, as well as we’ve seen it performed in KiCad with some Python. [Dave Jones] did a panelization tutorial for Altium. all of these have their downsides. putting more than one board style on a panel is not covered by the usual tools as well as tutorials. most techniques of panelizing boards only work with rectangular boards. Altium will do anything, however Altium is pricey.

What I requirement is a technique to take more than one weirdly-shaped board, as well as put it on a rectangular panel. requirement an example of this? inspect out the DEF con 24 badge to the right. This is a weird-shaped board, designed to in shape into a rectangular panel for automated assembly. instead of v-grooves, the board is just milled out of the panel, held on with mouse bites, or little tabs of fiberglass as well as holes. extremely clever implementations of this method likewise enable for pads as well as traces on the panel for programming each private board.

Can you do this in Eagle as well as KiCad, the most prominent tools for low-scale PCB style as well as fabrication? Yes, however it’s hard. Altium will do it easily, however that’s truly a tool for people who are producing tens of countless boards. To date, I’ve only discovered one tool that just enables you to decrease several Gerber data on a board as well as merge them.

Gerber Panelizer

The finest tool I’ve discovered for panelizing multiple board styles with routing as well as mouse bites comes from [Stijn Kuipers]. His PCB Panelizer (available on GitHub) is the very best thing I’ve discovered to take Gerbers you’ve already designed as well as turn them into an quickly manufacturable panel. before discovering this amazing tool, I spent about a day trying to figure out exactly how to panelize Gerbers. After discovering this tool, I was able to produce the panel I needed in about twenty minutes. Gerber Panelizer is a amazing tool, as well as I’ll be dedicating the rest of this publish to the ins as well as outs of this simple as well as simple method to produce panels of PCBs.

Using Gerber Panelizer

Using Gerber Panelizer might not be simpler. All you have to do is set up the size of the panel, decrease .zip data of your Gerbers onto the panel, add some breaktabs, as well as export the merged gerbers. After your computer does a bit bit of thinking, you get a panel of boards, prepared to send to a fab.

Step 1: open Gerber Panelizer

Step 2: define your panel size

This is the Panel Properties window. utilize this to define the board size, fill empty space, set the offset, etc

Step 3: decrease Gerbers onto the window

Step 4: location Breaktabs

Step 5: enjoy a panelized board

Of course, you’re not restricted to square or rectangular boards with Gerber Panelizer. any type of shape will do, as well as the ‘Fill empty Area’ in the Panel Properties window makes producing panels of weirdly-shaped PCBs easy.

I whipped up a quick artsy board of the GitHub Unicorn (five minutes in Eagle) as well as stole the source for the Freeduino. This is the very best example of what Gerber Panelizer can do. With this tool, you can panelize oddly-shaped boards, as well as put more than a single style on a panel.

Caveats to Gerber Panelizer

Gerber Panelizer is a excellent tool that enables you to quickly as well as quickly stitch several Gerber data together into a single, easily-manufacturable board. Unfortunately, the diy PCB crowd as well as open Hardware lovers in general, are cheapskates. traditional wisdom states the only tools worth having are the ones that are the ones that are free as in beer, an disagreement commonly transparently disguised as ‘free as in speech’. This means the software application is offered without support, as well as commonly with damaged features.

Gerber Panelizer is not without considerable issues, although a few of the blame can be directed at KiCad. The KiCad philosophy makes a distinction between milled, plated layers as well as the final cutout of the board. In KiCad, this means there’s a difference between .GKO as well as .GML Gerber files. KiCad, in its infinite wisdom, decided the cutout layer of the board should utilize the data extension .GM1 as an output Gerber. This has triggered much confusion, however the great news is this problem will be fixed shortly. OpenGL on Windows with Nvidia drivers is a hot mess of a dumpster fire. This issue can be solved by utilizing my laptop instead of my desktop battlestation. Additonally, the present release (at least at the time of this writing) does not support adding breaktabs between a Gerber data as well as the ‘fill empty area’ area. This was a bug solved by [Arsenijs] over on Hackaday.io. I owe him for fixing that bug for me, however the important thing right here is that I contribute money to open source development.

Is this a perfect solution to panelizing PCBs? No. Ideally, you’d want fiducials along the edge of your panel so the pick as well as location machine can tell where in area the panel is. You’ll likewise want some M4 holes along the side of the board, so the pick as well as location machine can move it along the producing line. However, this is rather actually the simplest as well as easiest method to panelize a lot of boards. No other tool comes close to Gerber Panelizer’s simplicity of use.

Despite these issues, Gerber Panelizer is a just amazing piece of software application that should be in everyone’s toolbox. Yes, there are issues, however it appears like the most important will be fixed in the next release.

If you’d like to play around with these Gerber files, you can discover them right here on hackaday.io.