What's the recommended way to create mouse bites?

[feklee]

There is the Panelization.pretty, which contains three mouse-bites, one of them:

However, I just need a single line to be put in the middle of a tab. It’s OK if, after breaking the board in two, half the tab is left protruding over the edge. Such a bite is not part of the library, so I want to make my own. Now I could just take the pictured mouse bite and modify it, but there are various things I don’t understand in that design, among them:

• What are the green circles for? (Eco1.User layer)

• Why are the two arcs on F.SilkS? (I think they would better fit on Dwgs.User.)

Now I wonder: Is there any standard to follow?

Manufacturer will be with Seeed Studio Fusion.

According to the blog post PCB Breakaway Panels, the location of the perforation in the pictured mouse bite is not recommended. Anyhow, that’s not relevant to me as I only want one perforation.

[Rene_Poschl]

@feklee there might not be a particular reason behind the features of this footprint. It might just be that the original designer likes it that way or their fab requested it that way.
In the end it is up to you how to make this footprint.

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@madworm is this your footprint? (github name fits forum name. Avatar seems to fit as well.) Maybe you can give a reasoning as to why the footprint is made that way.

[paulvdh]

Mouse bites are a part of panelisation, and this is one of the parts where KiCad is not very advanced (yet )

There are different attempts to improve this, and the script mentioned in the post below looks interesting:
https://forum.kicad.info/t/tool-for-creating-panels-in-pcbnew/15626

If you want to do it by hand, or can not use scripts, then you can use your mouse-bite footprint and modify it.

[madworm]

Yes, I made that one.
There are other variations, e.g. with a more curved break pattern, so no sharp edges occur.

The green circles represent a 2mm diameter for routing when making a panel.

Sometimes you can get away with just “drawing” a 2mm thick line for the routing path and the fab is clever enough to interpret that.

If not, you’d have to use the blue-ish lines and actually draw the outline of the routing path / slot - which is a pain in the …

An image, so you can get a visual.

[feklee]

@madworm Thanks for the explanation! I’m actually fine with drawing the outline. I just have two boards to be broken apart by the user. Panelization of all the double-boards I leave to Seeed.

@paulvdh Thanks for pointing me to the script. I think that’s overkill. As said above, I only have two boards to be joined.