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Electronics => PCB/EDA/CAD => KiCad => Topic started by: zapta on December 25, 2023, 08:22:33 pm

Title: How to panelize with Kicad?
Post by: zapta on December 25, 2023, 08:22:33 pm

I have a small rectangular PCB design in Kicad 7 I would like to panelize it as a simple grid.

1. What is a simple and reasonable way to do that?  (e.g. what plugin or tool).

2. Once I panelize, can I still make changes to the schematic and PCB without a tedious repanelizing?

Title: Re: How to panelize with Kicad?
Post by: Doctorandus_P on December 26, 2023, 12:36:49 am

If you open KiCad's "Plugin and Content Manager" and then type in "panel" as a search word, it finds two plugins. the "SparkFun KiCad Panelizer" and KiKit.

I think KiKit has some built in automation to help with updating the panel, but I am not sure.

Title: Re: How to panelize with Kicad?
Post by: selcuk on January 12, 2024, 07:40:38 pm

I agree with the recommendation. Kikit is simple and efficient for this job. After you panelize, you can save the configuration to a JSON file. If you update the design, you can import the JSON file and it automatically applies the same panelization to it.

Generic panelization software works on Gerber files. This one generates Kicad PCB, so that you can manually edit panel data if necessary. But you probably write simple post processing scripts to automatize that as well.