Author Topic: Board houses that accept loose gerbers to make panels  (Read 2802 times)

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Offline sensoTopic starter

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Board houses that accept loose gerbers to make panels
« on: October 16, 2012, 12:33:24 am »
Good night, I would like to know if you guys know some board houses that will accept gerbers files with different designs and sizes, that will panelize them and produce that panel.
This is because I have some designs that I would like to test, and some of my friends would also be glad to have prototype pcb's done in professional board houses, we know iTead/Seeed/Laen, but having 10 pcb's done is a bit of a waste to use one or two and then shelve the others that will have no use in the future.
So having a pcb/board house that would accept like 10 ou 20 different designs it would be perfect, and probably cheaper.

Thanks in advance.
 

Offline Psi

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Re: Board houses that accept loose gerbers to make panels
« Reply #1 on: October 16, 2012, 01:41:33 am »
If you panelize it then it doesn't matter how many designs are inside your panel, you just pay to get the panel produced.
But you have to join the gerber files from each project into a single file for each layer.

When i use PCBcart they have an options for 'single board' vs 'panel'.
If you pick 'single board' your design must only be one pcb but if you pick panel you can put whatever you like into the panel. The price is a bit higher for a panel vs single board of the same size.

However you could probably join many designs together and make them "seem" like a single design (tracks between designs). That way it looks like a single board to pcbcart.
Then you just cut the boards out yourself into separate pcbs which breaks those fake tracks.
I think that would likely be cheaper than a panel because companies add extra costs for panels due to extra processes needed, routing, vscore etc..
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Offline marshallh

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Re: Board houses that accept loose gerbers to make panels
« Reply #2 on: October 16, 2012, 07:50:06 pm »
Depending on the headache to you it may be worth paying the shop extra to panelize your designs for you.
I paid $80 extra to have two seperate gerber sets put next to each other on the panel with a v-score between.
This is not a bad tradeoff.
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