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.

Čo chcem
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 besPríklad toho, čo môže Gerber Panelizer urobiť. S týmto nástrojom môžete samostatne tvarované dosky, rovnako ako dať viac ako jeden štýl na paneli.

Upozornenia na Gerber Panelizer

Gerber Panelizer je vynikajúcim nástrojom, ktorý vám umožňuje rýchlo, ako aj rýchlo stehovať niekoľko dát Gerber do jednej, ľahko vyrobiteľnej dosky. Bohužiaľ, DIY PCB dav, ako aj otvorený hardvérový milenci všeobecne, sú lacné. Tradičné múdrosti uvádza, že jediné nástroje, ktoré stoja, sú tie, ktoré sú tie, ktoré sú zadarmo ako v pive, nezhoda bežne transparentne maskovať ako “slobodný ako v reči”. To znamená, že softvérová aplikácia je ponúkaná bez podpory, ako aj bežne s poškodenými funkciami.

Gerber Panelizer nie je bez značných problémov, hoci niekoľko z viny môže byť nasmerovaný na KICAD. Filozofia KICAD sa rozlišuje medzi mletým, pokovovanými vrstvami, ako aj konečným výrezom dosky. V KICADE, to znamená, že existuje rozdiel medzi .GKO, ako aj súbory Gerber .gml. KICAD, vo svojej nekonečnej múdrosti, rozhodol, že vrstva výrezu dosky by mala využiť rozšírenie dát .gm1 ako výstupný gerber. To spustilo veľa zmätku, ale veľká správa je tento problém bude opravený krátko. OpenGL v oknách s vodičmi NVIDIA je horúcim neporiadkom ohnivo. Túto otázku možno vyriešiť použitím môjho notebooku namiesto mojej plochy. Additonálne, súčasné vydanie (aspoň v čase tohto písania) nepodporuje pridanie breaktabs medzi dátami Gerber, ako aj oblasť ‘vyplniť prázdnu oblasť’. To bola chyba riešená [Arsenijs] nad Hackaday.io. Dlžím mu za to, že pre mňa upevňujem chybu, ale dôležitá vec je tu, že prispejem peniaze na rozvoj zdroja.

Je to perfektné riešenie obloženia PCB? Nie. V ideálnom prípade by ste chceli fiderikálny pozdĺž okraja vášho panelu, takže si môžete vyberať, ako aj miesto umiestnenia môže povedať, kde v oblasti je panel. Tiež budete chcieť nejaké otvory M4 pozdĺž strany dosky, takže si ho môžete pohybovať pozdĺž produkčnej línie. Je to však skôr najjednoduchšie, ako aj najjednoduchšia metóda na obloženia veľa dosiek. Žiadny iný nástroj sa neobsahuje jednoduchosť použitia Gerber Panelizer.

Napriek týmto problémom je Gerber Panelizer len úžasný kus softvérovej aplikácie, ktorá by mala byť vo všetkých nástrojoch. Áno, existujú problémy, ale objavuje sa, že najdôležitejšie bude stanovené v ďalšom vydaní.

Ak si prajete hrať s týmito súbormi Gerber, môžete ich nájsť priamo tu na Habowaday.io.