Panelizing describes the process of combining multiple boards onto one panel for manufacturing. E.g. if your manufacturer's cheap standard PCB offer is for a 100x100mm PCB and you have two 100x48mm PCBs you can combine them into one PCB which you can later break appart. This seems like a easy to do thing, but the "right" workflow was pretty hard to figure out.
The general steps involved:
- Finish a board layout on eagle
- Export the Gerbers with the CAM-Files supplied by the manufacturer and move them into a folder
- Check the Gerbers using a Online Gerber Viewer like webGerber on mayhewlabs.com or using a Open Source Tool like gerbv. Sadly both tools can (currently) just view Gerbers and not manipulate them.
- For Panelizing there are strangly not many good open source tools available. After a long search I found the pcb-panelizer by thisisnotrocketscience.nl which has a beautiful and easy to use GUI, brings all necessary tools also in a commandline version and exports beautiful PCB-preview pictures while exporting panelized PCBs. Just drag the Gerber folder with the PCBs into the GUI and specify the panel size. Add Breaktabs.
- Export panelized Gerbers
- The panelized gerbers should be checked for possible errors (missing drill holes – maybe you imported both a .dri and a .txt drill file and he just used one?).
- Upload to your PCB manufacturer's site
thisisnotrocketscience's pcb-panelizer allows also to save a file called .gerberset which can be used for future finetuning of a panelized gerber, without the need to import all Boards all over again.