I have a panel gerber that’s missing the paste layer, but I have the paste layer on the individual gerber. So I exported the paste layer into kicad, then copied and moved it to match the panel arrangement.
I’d like to double check that my DIY paste layer lines of with the pads on the original panel, but the whole thing is offset when I open the files together.
Is it possible to apply an offset to one layer of the gerbers?
What is the history of this project?
A screenshot to give an idea of the complexity in this panel would also help.
In KiCad, you can draw on F.Paste or B.Paste, but in general solder paste cutouts are an inherent part of footprints and their pads. Graphical items on a paste layer can be selected and moved (Use the *Selection Filter in the lower right corner) KiCad has several options under the right click context / pop up menu for a selection in the “Positioning Tools” sub menu:
Manually adding offsets to one of the files of a set of gerber files feels like a very bad solution. Maybe I interpret your goal wrong, but such offsets can easily result in you sending something else to the fab then what you see on your monitor.
Also, what does this mean:
I have not seen your panel, but as I wrote earlier, the paste layer is normally generated by the footprints and their pads. My first instinct would be to just delete that whole separate paste layer, and then use the tools in KiCad to replace the footprints with new ones which have the paste cutouts on their own pads. To do this is just a few mouse clicks for each type of footprint, so it probably is not very much work. (But it’s also guesswork, because I have not seen your PCB).
The panel was generated years ago by a manufacture and they excluded the paste layer for some reason. I don’t have the design files to work with, just gerbers. Otherwise I would regenerate all the layers together.
The panel is a simple rectangular grid.
Using the measurement tool in the gerber viewer, I was able to verify that the patterns match up, just with an XY offset. I’m reasonably confident it will line up when made into a stencil. But it would have been easier to move the layer to visually inspect all the pastes lining up with the pads.
Although thinking about it, I should just ask a new manufacturer to do a new panel for me since I’m getting a new stencil anyway.
For low to medium size manufacturing, the location of the paste layer compared to the rest of the PCB is not critical. Usually stencil alignment is a manual process, so as long as the relative positions of the holes are all right it should work.
In KiCad, you can re-create a PCB project from a set of Gerber files. I have written some about that in:
KiCad’s Gerber viewer is just that. It can show the Gerber files, but has no editing capabilities. There are editors for Gerber files, but at the moment the KiCad developers have no interest in adding editing capabilities to the Gerber viewer.
Also, in the thread below, someone is asking for paid work to do with KiCad. Maybe he is interested in turning your Gerber files into a full KiCad project.
I think you can do it this way:
