Merging gerbers: a hard case

Hi guys,

First up, I’m aware that this issue doesn’t directly pertains to KiCad but it’s fairly related so here it goes…

I’m trying to merge a couple of board for panelization purposes that have complex outlines and contain some oval holes. You can see the panel at https://UltimateHackingKeyboard.com/blog/2015/05/11/the-5th-generation-pcb-has-arrived

With gerbmerge I cannot merge them in an optimal fashion because the shape of the boards is very complex and gerbmerge can only deal with square shaped boards optimally.

I’ve also tried to merge the boards with gerbv from the command line which worked fairly well except that gerbv apparently doesn’t handle the oval holes of the USB connector and converts them to circular holes. This is a show stopper.

I’m looking for other ways to merge gerbers. The solution should preferably work on Linux and from the command line.

Thanks in advance!

What happens if you draw an outside rectangle on one of the copper layers? Maybe this way the outer shape of the gerber stackup will be simple enough for gerbmerge to understand?

It’s an interesting idea but I have very little space around these pads and also I would rather not want to bastardize the design in any such ways.

So, this is your final panel already or you will be panelizing this assembly on bigger PCBs yet? https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/5th-generation-pcb-front.jpg

Cool project, by the way!

This is the final panel which contains circular holes instead of oval holes. In the meantime I’ve ended up using the append board feature of pcbnew and it seems that it has solved the issue.

Thanks for the nice words regarding our project! :wink: