I am sending the gerber, drill & BOM to couple of fabs to get a quote. And it looks like they need different types of info (other than the ones I already provided) to give me a quote!
So one of them is asking for below information and I have no idea how to get them in KiCAD. Can you please help?
assembly drawings
fabrication drawings
I’m not 100% certain about the terminology, but roughly speaking these are what I supply for those items:
assembly drawings:
Technically a “coming soon” feature in KiCad, this is a drawing which shows position and designators for each component on the board. Usually this is only needed if you’re having your board populated. You can do a reasonable approximation by plotting the silk screen layers as PDF. It helps if you un-check the “exclude board outline from other layers” option, that way you get a board outline. I usually select the “Plot sheet reference on all layers option” when generating this PDF as well since it is only for human reading not machine. Usually I produce a “Module Positions” file as well (from File -> Fabrication Outputs) which is a machine readable pick and place file.
fabrication drawings:
This is normally a description of the mechanical board including details of layers, thickness of board, surface finish etc. Normally I just write out the description of the board thickness and gaps between layers, surface finish and copper thickness on the Dwgs.User layer. I add dimensions to the PCB and then plot this layer as a PDF with “exclude board outline” turned off to generate another human-readable description of the PCB.
Unfortunately I’ve only done this on commercial PCBs because the prototyping services I normally use for hobby projects don’t need this kind of detail. So I can’t actually post a design package as an example.