One design, two variants.

[mrburnzie]

Hi!
I have a design that has two variants.
I want to create a panel that will house both variants on it.
Also, from that panel I would like to export the combined BOM and pick and place.

Has anyone done something like this in the past? Can this be automated or is it a manual job?

I have tried creating a panel, but can't change the same board to have different variants, it changes them globally.
Also I couldn't find a way to combine the variant BOMs.

[Pseudobyte]

If it was just DNP differences I would just communicate that to your CM with two different BOMs. It is easy for them to skip out parts on half of a panel.

If you are needing alternate parts placed that becomes an issue because that just isn't how pick and places are programmed. I wouldn't even know how to approach this as a CM unless I was running it on two separate machines. 

[ajb]

How many boards per panel?  How different are the two BOMs?

I would think just sending gerbers for the whole panel, BOMs/PnP files for the individual variants, and instructions for which panel instances get which BOMs should be sufficient.  It's not that different from having the CM do the panelization for you--which would be another option you have. 

Unless you have a reason to want the two variants panelized together, it may not be that big a deal to have the CM do two runs with homogenous panels, depending on quantities.