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.

Hvad jeg vil
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 eksempel på, hvad Gerber Panelizer kan gøre. Med dette værktøj kan du paneler mærkeligt formede brædder, samt sætte mere end en enkelt stil på et panel.

Advarsel til Gerber Panelizer

Gerber Panelizer er et glimrende værktøj, der gør det muligt hurtigt så hurtigt som hurtigt at sy flere Gerber-data sammen i et enkelt, letproducent bord. Desværre er DIY PCB-mængden såvel som åbne hardware elskere generelt, cheapskates. Traditionel visdom angiver de eneste værktøjer, der er værd at have, er dem, der er dem, der er fri som i øl, en uenighed, der er almindeligt gennemsigtigt forklædt som “fri som i tale”. Det betyder, at softwareprogrammet tilbydes uden støtte, såvel som almindeligt med beskadigede funktioner.

Gerber Panelizer er ikke uden betydelige problemer, selv om nogle af skylden kan rettes på Kicad. Kicad-filosofien sondrer mellem formalet, belagt lag samt den endelige udskæring af bestyrelsen. I Kicad betyder det, at der er forskel på .GKO samt .GML GERBER-filer. Kicad, i sin uendelige visdom, besluttede bustagets udskæringslag, bør udnytte dataforlængelsen .gm1 som en output Gerber. Dette har udløst meget forvirring, men de store nyheder er, at dette problem vil blive fastsat kort tid. OpenGL på vinduer med NVIDIA-drivere er et varmt rod af en dumpster ild. Dette problem kan løses ved at udnytte min bærbare computer i stedet for min desktop-battlestation. ADDITONALLY, den nuværende udgivelse (i det mindste på tidspunktet for denne skrivning) understøtter ikke at tilføje breaktabs mellem et gerberdata såvel som området ‘Fyld tomtareal’. Dette var en fejl, der blev løst af [Arsenijs] over på Hackaday.IO. Jeg skylder ham for at fastsætte, at fejl for mig, men det vigtige her er, at jeg bidrager med penge til at åbne kildeudvikling.

Er dette en perfekt løsning til panelering af PCB’er? Nej. Ideelt set vil du have fiducials langs kanten af ​​dit panel, så vælg såvel som placeringsmaskine kan fortælle, hvor i området panelet er. Du vil ligeledes have nogle M4 huller langs brættets side, så vælg såvel som placeringsmaskine kan flytte den langs den producerende linje. Dette er dog ret faktisk den enkleste såvel som nemmeste metode til at paneler mange brædder. Intet andet værktøj kommer tæt på Gerber Panelizer’s Simplicity of Use.

På trods af disse problemer er Gerber Panelizer et bare fantastisk stykke software applikation, der skal være i alles værktøjskasse. Ja, der er problemer, men det ser ud som det vigtigste vil blive fastsat i næste udgivelse.

Hvis du gerne vil lege med disse Gerber-filer, kan du opdage dem lige her på Hackaday.IO.