Is their some common server side program that can take kicad schematic and board and pannelise for assembly?

[Josheeg]

Is their some common server side program that can take kicad schematic and board and pannelise for assembly?
Like WordPress or cms plugin?

[paulvdh]

What do you mean with this?

There are several scripts that help with pannelizing KiCad PCB’s but these do not need the schematic, just the PCB.

And why the “server side”. Why drag the whole internet into this?
Have you done some simple searches such as:
https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=kicad+panel+pcb

Is any of those near to what you want? What are the differences?

[Josheeg]

Hi I went to the search result http://www2.thisisnotrocketscience.nl/software/pcb-panelizer/

Now I see how this tool can give me a osh park pannel design with a gui. Also perforated connection s.

The problem is the placement information goes away.

How can the machene fallow this?

If there was a kicad extension that took a top level schematic sheet multiplied that with the panneling and kept the anotation together in that process it may connect common things and need some kicad tweeks but it would be more adapt to design manufactured prototype to production.

[halachal]

Just let the manufacturer handle this. It’s what they do every day and they will thank you for not ■■■■■■■ shit up that they need to fix.

[paulvdh]

Do you really need panels?
and why?

If it’s for higher production volumes, you should always do the panelisation in combination with your PCB manufacturer. If you do it yourself you have the risc of much higher costs. For example, assume your PCB manufacturer works with a default raw material size of 1000x1000mm, and you design a panel that is 501 * 501mm That would produce almost 3/4 waste.

This is how Ospark makes panels:

I assume it’s done with some computer fitting algorithm.

Paneling in KiCad is in it’s infancy and not really supported yet in KiCad itself.
You should have a completely DRC free board before you start Pcbnew in “standalone” mode to make your panel and then not change anything on the boards after that.

[halachal]

Interesting that they have the copper etched from the dead areas. I would have assumed the opposite would be more efficient.

[hermit]

Maybe at scale the copper reclamation is worth it?

[kenyapcomau]

I don’t think you’ll find anything fitting your description. There are two poles of panelising.

PCB fabs do it to fill up their large panels. They probably have equipment and staff to do this all day. They use the small dimension jobs to fill out the otherwise unused areas.

Then at the other end there are cheapskates like me who want to fill up 100x100 mm boards with many copies of say a breakout board measuring only say 16x20 mm and would a waste to make one per board. For this use case there are simple programs that just replicate the Gerbers, adding breaktabs or V-cuts to separate. That’s just a matter of coordinate translation. But when you want to handle the BoM information and do assembly too, I don’t know of anything. Hobby programmers don’t have the motivation to write something that would require a lot of testing and best left to the fab anyway.