Pcbnew crashes when plotting gerbers

[Don011]

Hi all. I am having a problem where Pcbnew crashes completely when trying to plot gerbers for a particular PCB.

I have two .kicad_pcb files for this layout, one as a single standalone board and another which has the board panelised for production. The file that contains the single standalone board plots without any problems but when I try to plot the panelised version Pcbnew/Kicad crashes. (This happens regardless of whether I have the .kicad_pcb opened through a project or directly into Pcbnew.) It doesn’t matter how many boards I panelise together it still crashes and for the sake of trying to find what is causing the problem I am now only panelising two at a time.

The board is a very simple pass through module to be used in place of another module for some applications of a larger project. As far as I can see there is very little to go wrong with this layout.

Here is my 1x2 panelised version that crashes when I plot gerbers:

I have also tried to remove and simplify things as much as possible and the only way that I have got it to work is by removing the breakoff part in the middle and making the top and bottom outline a single unbroken line. (Having an outline with two segments on an edge still doesn’t work.) But this obviously defeats the purpose of panelising. This leads me to think that there is something wrong with the outline but I don’t know what. I don’t have any problems plotting other panelised designs.

I am running Kicad 5.0 on Windows 10 and I have just today re-downloaded and reinstalled to fix the wxWidgets problem. (I had the same problem before reinstalling except I would get a wxWidgets error before the crash. I can’t remember what the error message was.)

I would post some more pictures to explain but I’ve only just signed up so I’m limited to one per post.

Any ideas on what is going wrong? Should I submit this as a bug?

[PCB_Wiz]

@Don011

Here is my 1x2 panelised version that crashes when I plot gerbers:

Did you try plotting one Gerber layer at a time ?
eg if edge.cuts plot fails, that points to an entity on edge.cuts

[Don011]

Ok well I think I’ve found the solution. Someone suggested checking that the filenames/path weren’t too long. The path to the pcb file is quite long so I reduced the length of the filename and it now plots fine. I did a bit of testing and it looks like the plotting runs into problems once the file path is longer than 243 characters. Is this a known problem?

I have no idea why simplifying the board outline seemed to help initially. Maybe that was just a coincidence.