Replies

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  Posted by peter200 at Fri Oct 08, 2010 8:56 am

  Hi Martin,

  Actually my PCB manufacturer allows me  to arrange my panel with different designs, following his recommandations/rules to make a correct panel (quite simple, mostly placement of boards, the manufacturer does the rest) . It is a great function for prototyping because I can put several design for almost the same prize, and time.

  I come from Proteus software, and it has already this function embedded. I find it very useful. You have almost the same function : the method I have tried with design Spark works fine to make a panel such as my manufacturer accepts, the only problem is the reference names modified. Do you have a trick, a way around this limitation ? I want to have 2 "R1" on my PCB design, and I can make all the panels I want.

  Now I have done 3 boards with DesignSpark, and my wish list is ready ! If you want I can submit it to you.

  Regards,

  Peter

   

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  Posted by Martin Keenan at Fri Oct 08, 2010 9:53 am

  I'll need to check if we have a quick workaround for the reference names.  Yes, would really like to get your feedback on the software - please drop us an email with them on and we will address each one with you!

  Thanks Peter,

  Martin

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  Posted by Martin Keenan at Fri Oct 08, 2010 10:11 am

  Hi Peter,

  well no, there isn't a way to overcome this easily.  The only way we can suggest is to add a value to every component with the name that you want to display, and show this instead of the real component name.  Then these values will appear unchanged when you paste several designs together.  But, its a fair amount of work, and also means that if you change any of the original component names you need to remember to change the values to match. 

  Martin
  

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  Posted by ds929 at Sat Oct 16, 2010 6:40 am

  There are a couple of free 3rd party gerber based panelization tiler utilities I have found while researching the topic.  I can't say that I have had occasion to use them myself, but others have claimed success with them:

  http://claymore.engineer.gvsu.edu/~steriana/Software/gerbmerge/index.html

  http://claymore.engineer.gvsu.edu/~steriana/Python/

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/gbtiler/

  Gerbv which is mostly famed as a gerber viewer can also seem to do it if you give it command line parameters to specify that function:

  http://archives.seul.org/geda/dev/May-2008/msg00035.html

  But, yes, it is the sort of feature that would be awesome to see added to DS in the future.  

  It would also be nice to have some capability to take an existing gerber file set, import that as a hard 'macro' on the PCB, edit out stuff you don' t want from the gerber file area, and then be able to interface to that via items added via the usual schematic capture and PCB layout processes.  The use case I'm thinking of for the latter would be the unfortunately common case where a IC vendor has a 'reference design' that is given only in gerber format or in a CAD format almost nobody has access to, but including certain critical PCB layout features for puroses of say thermal design, EMI/EMC, RF engineering, sensitive analog circuit functions, et. al. so they highly encourage you to use the exact recommended layout for a critical portion of the board but then to interface your own stuff to it as peripherals.  A lot of SMPS ICs or RF ICs are in such a category.  If there was an easy way to trace out or gerber-include the recommended key layout features and then extend upon them with custom schematic/PCB defined circuits that would make a lot of these ICs more usable.  Usually the only alternative is to try to recreate the suggested layout / feature shapes and positioning as best as one can with one's chosen CAD package, but this is at the very least hard, and often basically impossible if it is finely detailed stuff involving small and intricately shaped transmission lines or whatever.  Actually even just a way to import a gerber layer as a "tracing paper" selectable semi-transparent visual overlay at scale over the top of whatever one's PCB layout is would be progress, then at least one could stand a more reasonable chance at defining tracks / zones / paths / pads that more or less match a recommended predefined layout.  If DS supported / worked well with something like a digitizer tablet as an entry device one could even pretty easily create complex shaped paths / zones etc. by tracing the edges of these suggested layouts, though a fine mouse might do for many things.

   

   

   

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  Posted by peter200 at Tue Oct 19, 2010 9:28 pm

  Hi,

  I totally agree with your requests !

  Thanks for the links.

  Peter

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  Posted by peter200 at Fri Jul 22, 2011 2:12 pm

  Hi,

  How can I do panelisation ? In the case of same PCB repeated, and in the case of different PCB ?

  What I have tried :  I create a new PCB design in which I paste PCB designs I want to panelize. The problem with this method is that the reference name are modified (not possible to have 2 "R1" in the same design obviously).

  thanks for help,

  regards,

  Peter

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  Posted by arturo.jsx at Fri Aug 05, 2011 7:05 pm

  This is something we would like to have in designspark.

   

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  Posted by MasterFX at Thu Feb 16, 2012 5:03 pm

  Unfortunately panelizing still doesn't work with Designspark PCB v3.

  When is this feature coming? You just have to remove the "autorenaming" of the components.