One board with twice layout

I have a board which is 10cm x 10cm. My pcb in the project is 5cm x 10cm. I started the PCB tool from external and placed two of the project pcbs together.
First question: Is this the correct way to add more than one layout to the pcb? No I have two frames and I guess I should create only one frame.
Second question: I like to create a “break line” for dividing the pcb. How can I do this?

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I should raise most cheap PCB fabs will see that your self paneling your designs and charge you more for that same 10x10 PCB (They may call is multiple types), equally you will need to leave room for a v-carve if that is what you want as a dividing line

In short for small scale production >1000 units, its usually cheaper to just buy twice as many half sized PCB’s, and have them routed, than pay for panels where you have defined the size.

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You may or may not get charged extra for a V-cut (breaktabs require extra space for the channel which you didn’t allow). it depends on the fab. Even their instructions are not always consistent. They sometimes allow multiple copies of a single design. Sometimes you have to ask for a quote to find out.

Appending the board in pcbnew is one way. There are also external tools to do panelising, e.g. KiKit.

For V-cut the usual way is to draw an edge to edge line in the Edge Cuts layer. It also wouldn’t hurt to mention it in a note.

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You should check with the manufacturer of your board for their guidelines, below there are some quick examples:

https://www.pcbway.com/pcb_prototype/PCB_Panel_Creation.html

http://docs.oshpark.com/troubleshooting/panelized-designs/

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As said before the magic word to look for is “panelization”, and in tandem with that “mousebites”.

Normally panelization should always be done in communication with your board manufacturer. Take for example a PCB manufacturer that has default stock of 100 * 100cm boards and you make a panel of 51cm * 51cm. That would result in almost 75% of waste.

For panels there are sort of 2 main ways of separating the boards. One is with a router, which will need a distance of 1mm to 3.5mm between the boards, and the other is V-grooving, which requires no extra distance (or some very small distance (0.5mm?)) between the boards, but this V-grooving can only be done in straight lines over the whole board.

For small quantities it’s usually best to do no panelizing at all and just order the boards itself.

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This worked at ‘generic cheap place in China’. Edge line and note. The 3D viewer didn’t care much for it though. :wink:

Edited text color to show up better. The notes were on the Cmts.User layer.

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