V-Scoring of a board

Manufacturing
1

Hi,

Me again. Below an image of the board I am designing and the 2 red arrows point to where I wabt to put the V-Score marks so I can break it apart alter. This is due to costs as the 2 small ones are not very big. The whole enchilada is 147mm llong and 61mm wide

Does this make sense or should I make 3 separate boards on one single Gerber file and then let the manufacturer panelize it ?

Please have patience with me as it is my first PCB I make. I have been making all my circuits so far only on perf boards due to single quantity and this would be the first one for selling the hardware.

1891Ɨ900 688 KB

2

The answers to this are not really technical, but depend on what you plan for manufacturing, assembly and the logistics of that. Depending on the fab house, they charge for extras, so it may not work out cheaper.

Personally, I use a dirt cheap fab house, at 20$ for 10 boards its simply easier to order 3 separate boards. FR4 is quite tough on saw blades, though I recently bought a diamond saw.

At work we create a ā€œmini-panelā€, we call it a biscuit (is that a standard term?), which is used for assembly. The biscuit sits on a carrier and travels through P&P, reflow, wave. After that it is split and the boards tested.

Anyway, itā€™s a tradeoff between setup costs and unit cost, all depends on volume.

2 Likes
3

Hi bobc,

Thanks. Will separate all boards as you recommend and send then all boards to fab and to be shipped in one single package.

This helps me to get more experience with KiCad

Rainer

4

They will still charge extra, they know you are avoiding two setup fees

5

Hi,

Thanks. I reworked all boards into each a single one and will order them separately.

On the other side it was a good practice and I was able to draw better schema as well as I gain experience in routing as well as everything else.

Thanks davidrsb as well as bobc

:thumbsup:

1 Like
6

some more infoā€¦ cheapest sizes for 2-sided (and even 4-layer) are usually 5x5 cm and 10x10 cm.
Anything that is outside those sizes getā€™s ā€˜dearā€™ very fast.
The older eurocart format 100x160 mm seems to get out of love with the economic fabs in china.

You can also try to cram a couple designs into the 10x10 cm ā€˜panelā€™ and let them mill it apart, sub-boards just connected by mouse-bites.
For 1.6 mm thick boards a 1 mm slot is advised and for 2 mm 1.5 mm slots.

Search the forums for ā€˜panelā€™ and you find more advise along that kind of avenueā€¦ I do that all the time. No extra cost usually.

1 Like
7

I have an idea that can be changed into a board and does not require an extra charge.
If you can, you can send me the information.
I will upload pictures to the network at the time of completion.
I am from the Chinese PCB manufacturing plant, my position is the engineer.
Of course you have to allow the data to be out of some nonfunctionable PAD and holes there are lines