An easy way to support panelization

[liang_y_jlu]

There’re tools like KiKit to do penalization. If your work is simple, they work fine. If your work is complex, they usually work, in a complex way, maybe with some codes. If you want to burn/test all boards with a single group of pinheads and catch mistakes with DRC. It seems no tools can help. But with a very small change, we can do all these in KiCAD itself.

Here is the idea: We already have “Paste Special” command. And we already have the option: Assign unique reference designators to pasted symbols. All we need is a new option: Append a postfix to designators of pasted symbols/nets. Now you can put them anywhere you want! Then we create some mosebites connections in footprint libraries. Now you can do any kind of penalization, all in KiCAD.

We can do the same thing in schematic, so every part can be different.

[retiredfeline]

I think you meant panelization, not penalization which means things like fining people or sending them to jail.

[jmk]

@liang_y_jlu
Here is a quote, from another thread, by a lead developer:

@craftyjon

Panelization is on the complete other end of the scale in terms of complexity. Right now, KiCad does not have the underlying architecture to enable you to open two boards at the same time, for example. There is a long list of challenges to solve before one could write a fully-integrated panelization tool that would feel like the rest of KiCad. Perhaps if more of these challenges are solved later as part of other feature implementations, it will become less of a big deal to add a panelization tool. But for right now, it’s far more complex a thing to ask for than almost any other feature that anyone asks for (up there with integrated FEM, which is something a lot more people have been asking for).

Maybe panelizing is not so easy to support.

[RaptorUK]

@liang_y_jlu

But with a very small change, we can do all these in KiCAD itself.

Thank you for offering to code up this small change . . . once you are ready please submit it for evaluation and inclusion in the next build

[eelik]

Interesting word, it seems to create misspellings: How do I ‘panalize’ in Kicad?, the link text in the FAQ.

[eelik]

By the way, someone with more free time could write a better FAQ article for this frequently occurring topic.

[retiredfeline]

I would not use that old 2017 topic for advice though. Development on that panelizer seems to have ceased. There are better alternatives now. The adavantage of that panelizer written in C# is that it works at the Gerber level so not specific to any ECAD suite.