Kicad Mouse Bites

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The script runs, and boom, mouse bites and a panel. This is a KiCad specific tool, and we’ve seen other tools for KiCad that make multiple copies of a board. Lode runner the legend returns dos download. We’ve also seen tools that take raw. Mouse bites are a part of panelisation, and this is one of the parts where KiCad is not very advanced (yet ) There are different attempts to improve this, and the script mentioned in the post below looks interesting.

  1. Kicad Mouse Bites Picture
  2. Kicad Mouse Bite Footprint
Kicad mouse bites vs

Kicad Mouse Bites Picture

I wanted to panelize a test board I made in KiCAD in order to send to a fabrication house for a test run. I thought it would be fun to do it so I can learn how to panelize. I found out about the GerberPanelizer from ThisisNotRocketScience GerberTools github repository. I immediately went to the repo’s release page hoping I would find working Linux binaries, but its a C# application and on downloading and launching the windows binary in mono, I got some errors. The only other option was to clone the source and build in my machine. It was not straight forward. I found the awesome issue 53 on the repo which explains how to install in Linux step by step, including the cloning some of the dependancies and building them, but that did not work all the way through. The following steps helped me easily get GerberPanelizer running on Ubuntu Linux[18.04].

    1. install .NET and mono packages
    2. Clone the source

Kicad Mouse Bite Footprint

  1. Grab a Linux hacked branch
  2. Download a release version of the tools:
    Get the zipped release files, extract somewhere and copy all files except the Help folder, the executable GerberPanelizer.exe and its config GerberPanelizer.exe.config to the source folder ~/src/GerberTools/
  3. Build the gerber panelizer
  4. Run the Gerber panelizer

    First screen when you launch gerber panelizer

    There is an excellent post on hackaday on how to actually export gerber files from KiCAD project, import them into GerberPanelizer, layout the panel, add mouse bites and finally export merged gerber files. I have no intention of replicating that stuff here.

    Here is a test circuit that I panelized.

    Combined Gerber Bottom Render Image