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.
Vad jag vill
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 Exempel på vad Gerber Panelizer kan göra. Med det här verktyget kan du panelera otroligt formade brädor, samt lägga mer än en enda stil på en panel.
Caveats till Gerber Panelizer
Gerber Panelizer är ett utmärkt verktyg som gör att du snabbt kan sticka flera Gerber-data tillsammans i ett enda, lättillverkningsbräda. Tyvärr är DIY PCB-publiken samt öppna maskinvaruälskare i allmänhet, cheapskates. Traditionell visdom stater de enda verktygen som är värda att ha är de som är de som är fria som i öl, en oenighet som vanligtvis är transparent förtäckt som “fri som i tal”. Det betyder att programvaran erbjuds utan stöd, liksom vanligt med skadade funktioner.
Gerber Panelizer är inte utan stora problem, även om några av skulden kan riktas mot KICAD. KICAD-filosofin skiljer mellan fräsade, pläterade lager samt den slutliga utklippningen av styrelsen. I KICAD betyder det att det är en skillnad mellan .gko samt .gml Gerber-filer. KICAD, i sin oändliga visdom, bestämde brädans utskjutningsskikt bör använda dataförlängningen .gm1 som en utgång gerberg. Detta har utlöst mycket förvirring, men den stora nyheten är det här problemet kommer att lösas inom kort. OpenGL på Windows med NVIDIA-drivrutiner är en varm röra av en dumpsterbrand. Det här problemet kan lösas genom att använda min bärbara dator istället för min skrivbordsbattlagning. Tillsatsvis stödjer den nuvarande frisättningen (åtminstone vid tidpunkten för detta skrivande) att lägga till breaktabs mellan en Gerber-data såväl som området “Fyll tomma area”. Detta var en bugg löst av [Arsenijs] över på Hackaday.io. Jag är skyldig honom för att fixa det buggen för mig, men det viktiga här är att jag bidrar med pengar till öppen källkod.
Är det här en perfekt lösning på panelisering av PCB? Nej. Ideellt vill du ha fiducials längs kanten på din panel så att valet samt platsmaskinen kan berätta var i området panelen är. Du kommer också att ha några M4-hål längs sidan av brädet, så valet samt platsmaskinen kan flytta den längs den producerande linjen. Men det här är ganska faktiskt den enklaste såväl som enklaste metoden att panelera många brädor. Inget annat verktyg kommer nära Gerber Panelizer enkel användning.
Trots dessa problem är Gerber Panelizer ett utmärkt programtycke som ska vara i allas verktygslåda. Ja, det finns problem, men det verkar som om det viktigaste kommer att fixas i nästa utgåva.
Om du vill leka med dessa Gerber-filer kan du upptäcka dem här på Hackaday.io.
