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yaqwsx / KiKit

Automation tools for KiCAD
https://yaqwsx.github.io/KiKit
MIT License
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Feature Request: Mousebites on the frame #727

Open g-v-egidy opened 3 months ago

g-v-egidy commented 3 months ago

Prerequisites

Description

For depanelization I prefer the manual DP-25-N tool pictured below. It is available for example from Hakko or Piergiacomi. tool1 tool2

For the tool to work properly, you need mousebites on both sides of the pcb as the tool needs to break off the tab on both sides and push it downwards.

Currently when Kikit creates a panel with tabs and outer frame, there are mousebites between two single pcbs, but no mousebites between the pcb and the outer frame: mousebites-current-kikit

For the example pcb shown above I manually copied the mousebites over like this: mousebites-manually-made

It would be nice if KiKit could automatically do this for me with an option.

dronecz commented 3 months ago

I think that mouse bites are generated at one side is because of manufacturing limitations. If you look at a guide for JLCPCB they will not manufacture this kind of PCB.

g-v-egidy commented 3 months ago

Thank you for looking into this issue.

JLCPCB has produced several different panels with mouse bites on both sides for me without complaining or asking me about this.

When reading the guide you linked, I read "Mouse bites are not needed on the process edge side". I don't read from this that there is a manufacturing limitation or that they won't manufacture it that way. I read from this that they don't think these double row mousebites are necessary. This is probably because they prefer some other depaneling method/tool.

So I think creating the double row mousebites should not become the default. But I would still prefer if it would be an option you can select if you use one of the depaneling tools I showed.

yaqwsx commented 2 months ago

We should definitely support this. However, the implementation won't be straightforward because of how we treat tabs - a tab is a piece of substrate that starts on a partition line and spans towards PCB edge. The PCB edge forms a cutline. Board-to-board tabs is actually a combination of two tabs spanning from the same point to different directions. However, frame tab is only a single tab. Details: https://yaqwsx.github.io/KiKit/latest/panelization/tabs.

We need to distinguish tabs between boards and tabs between a board and a frame. I see a couple of possibilities on how to approach this, however, it will require further analysis.