The best tool I’ve found for panelizing multiple board designs with routing and mouse bites comes from. To date, I’ve only found one tool that simply allows you to drop multiple Gerber files on a board and merge them. Altium will do it easily, but that’s really a tool for people who are manufacturing tens of thousands of boards. Extremely clever implementations of this technique also allow for pads and traces on the panel for programming each individual board.Ĭan you do this in Eagle and KiCad, the most popular tools for low-scale PCB design and fabrication? Yes, but it’s hard. Instead of v-grooves, the board is simply milled out of the panel, held on with mouse bites, or small tabs of fiberglass and holes. This is a weird-shaped board, designed to fit into a rectangular panel for automated assembly. Need an example of this? Check out the DEF CON 24 badge to the right. What I need is a method to take more than one weirdly-shaped board, and put it on a rectangular panel. Altium will do anything, but Altium is pricey. Most methods of panelizing boards only work with rectangular boards. Putting more than one board design on a panel is not covered by the usual tools and tutorials. We’ve seen it done in Eagle with a ULP script, and we’ve seen it done in KiCad with some Python. Panelizing boards, or putting multiple copies of a board in a single Gerber file, is nothing new. What I want The DEF CON 24 badge, in a panel This is how you panelize boards quickly and easily using Open Source tools. Simply by virtue of the fact that panelizing boards is far less common than throwing some Gerbers at OSH Park or Seeed, there aren’t many (good) tutorials, and even fewer (good) tools to do so. For small-scale production and prototypes, bare boards will do just fine. Really, you only want a panel of boards when you’re manufacturing something. Panelizing boards is something most of us won’t have to do often. You can check out this great interview with from OSH Park to get an idea of how this works, but the basic process is to take a bunch of Gerbers, add tabs and mouse bites, solve the knapsack problem, and send the completed panel off to a board house. These are ‘mouse bites’ and tabs, places where the boards are strung together to form a gigantic rectangular panel sent off to a manufacturer. Around the perimeter of your board, you’ll find some rough spots. If you’re still wondering what this means, take a look at the last board you got from OSH Park, Seeed, Itead, or Dirty PCBs. Panelization is the art of taking PCB designs you already have, whether they’re KiCad board files, Eagle board files, or just Gerbers, and turning them into a single collection of PCBs that can be sent off to a fab house. For reasons that will remain undisclosed until some time in the future, I recently had a need to panelize a few PCBs.

Altium pcb design turns dark