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Trying to understand "panelize" tool

jlawton
Tue, 22 Mar 2022 04:50:14 GMT

Using beta 8.994, I have a small # of 2-sided boards, Gerbers and Excellons from KiCAD 6.02, I have generated geometries and job files for one-off boards just fine. Now I would like to panelize two rows of different boards next to each other on a larger piece of double-clad. So yes I can see it makes arrays of copper layers, cutouts, drill patterns and mouse bites. Unfortunately in order for the arrays to align correctly the panelizer tool appears to assume I know the (completely different!) inter-item spacing for each of these entities and how to move each of them separately, not only do I not know but there doesn't appear to be any way to either aggregate these into clusters of "board units" or to readily measure the distance from one "reference object" to the other. Of course if one either "eyeballs it" or attempts to figure it out the odds of failing and dropping process yield to exactly zero increases exponentially. Maybe there IS a way to have the tool tell ME what number belongs in that "spacing" box but if it's there I'm just not seeing it. And there's o ne more problem, with 2 sided you also need to line up the boards on a row or column so the centerlines of the bounding boxes around which you are going to mirror are guaranteed to be identical, not JUST on the first row/column but on ALL of them, because I would expect you mirror an entire row or column at once (or at least that would seem to be reasonable). That makes resolving this problem all the more essential! Am I missing the concept completely here?