Mirror PCB Layout

[Justin_Atkins]

Hello! I’ve made a PCB for a gadget that is meant to go on the right hand. I am looking to make a left hand one too that is the exact same but flipped, since I don’t want to have to make an entirely new PCB. Is there any way to just mirror it across the y to get the left hand PCB? Thanks

[paulvdh]

I suggest you first order mirrored versions of all your IC’s and other multi-pin parts. If you have those, and verify they are really mirrored, we can suggest some workarounds to mirror the PCB itself in KiCad.

[ekoeck]

I don’t know exactly, what has to be mirrored, but maybe it will be sufficient to flip all buttons, signaling and connectors onto the other side of the PCB and only reroute their connection? Or even just add some vias (like for the 4-pin LEDs) and be done?

[bask185]

What you want cannot be done. You will need to redo the entire PCB part. Atleast you can get to reuse your schematic.

What may be of help in the future is changing your workflow a little bit. If you plan to release several variations to a design you need to be able to easily reuse parts of schematics and boards. This can be done in KiCad.

What you perhaps could do for now to save you some labour, is to copy/paste the project and before whiping the board. You can group certain footprints alongside their tracks and vias. Than you can drag around the groups with some of the routing unaltered. Relocate the groups and do the remaining routing.

However I do see a very cramped board. So this may propably not work for you.

I once dumped my workflow online in order to achieve repeatability and avoid errors and thus loss of time and money. If you are in for a short read, there may be something of value in it for you?

Best possible workflow

Fellow Kicad users, I wanted to show what my optimalized current flow looks like when starting projects from scratch. There were a few problems I had to solve once and for all. And I thought that it could not hurt to post my workflow here. Perhaps it may answer a question or two for somebody one day. The Problems to overcome rerouting the same things over and over again following the above, redoing silk text placement too big silk texts footprint links vendor ID codes corrected paths to 3D m…

Bas

[paulvdh]

@bask185

What you want cannot be done. You will need to redo the entire PCB part.

OP already understood it (he gave me a like) ekoeck apparently still has to think a bit about it.

Recently there was a similar topic, dealing with a PCB for a left / right tail light pair:

Mirror image of the entire PCB

Exactly. I made a PCB design for the left side of the car. I don’t want to do the same thing twice, only on the right side. Therefore, I need to mirror the PCB on the left side to get the finished PCB on the right side. In this way, I will have two PCBs made for the left and right sides from one target design that I made for the left side.

It is possible to design a PCB in such a way that some features are mirrored (Easy for the tail light, but difficult for a very dense PCB such as this). KiCad does not have good support (yet) for “assembly variants” (which could be used for this). Another option is to use THT parts for some things such as (the ubiquitous 6mm) push button and LED’s. Those parts can then be inserted from either the front or the back to mimic “mirrored” features.

[Justin_Atkins]

Yeah, what I did was just flip the board, delete everything but the footprints, then import the new components and place them over the old to get a general “mirrored” layout and reroute everything.

[Justin_Atkins]

Thanks for the help everyone

[Piotr]

@paulvdh

OP already understood it (he gave me a like)

But we don’t know it. Or at least I didn’t found the way to find it. I see who gave me a like but can’t see likes received by someone else. I’ve just tried if clicking at the same post (giving you like) I will se who also likes it, but I don’t see it.
I also don’t know if post can be marked as ‘Solution’ only by OP or also by others. Don’t try it to not make mess at forum.

[ekoeck]

Could you elaborate? Surely with my approach the PCB won’t be exactly the same since the SMD components are on the other side of the PCB but after all its the same PCB, mirrored, with all relevant parts (connectors, LED) suited for a left handed version oO

[paulvdh]

@ekoeck

Could you elaborate?

1. Take for example a SOIC16.
2. Put it before you with pin 1 in the upper left corner.
3. Pin 2, 3, etc (all though pin 8) are now on the left side.
4. This matches the footprint.
5. Now mirror the footprint for the SOIC16. (Mirror around vertical axis for this example).
6. Pin 1 of the (mirrored) footprint is now in the upper right corner.
7. It is no longer possible to rotate the physical SOIC16 to match the footprint.
8. The only way is to put the SOIC16 with the text down on the PCB, and then bend all the pins to fit on the pads again.

There are some IC’s that can be ordered in a mirrored version They tend to have some suffix to the part number to indicate this. This is quite rare though.

[ekoeck]

Ok, then I probably expressed myself unclear. My intention is (as I tried to explain in my original post): flip all HID elements (LEDs, buttons, connectors) on the onto the back side, add some vias and/or reroute locally around the flipped components, done. There you have your left handed PCB, only the SMD components are now on the other side wrt the other PCB. So if that’s no issue this would be the least effort to create a left-handed PCB from a right-handed one in my opinion.