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mikekehrli
USA
17 Posts |
 Posted - 09 Jul 2010 : 17:37:06
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I have 4 small boards that all use essentially the same parts. I want to combine all 4 boards into one panel, and have them all manufactured together. Even this panel, will get panelized. But doing it all as one job rather than 4 separate jobs will save quite a bit of money.
I've tried combing the PCB files, but each time I add a board, the components numbering changes. It won't let there be 2 more than 1 "R1", for instance. I want to suppress this behavior, so that each board's component designations don't change. If I can achieve that, then combining the board is a snap. Can Easy PC do that?
I have version 12 at the moment.
mike@fuelsaver-mpg.com
www.fuelsaver-mpg.com |
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mikekehrli
USA
17 Posts |
Posted - 09 Jul 2010 : 18:34:03
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The sentence in the previous post should read: " It won't let there be more than 1 "R1", for instance. "
Basically I want these 4 separate boards to keep their component designations. So each board will have an "R1", and "R2", and so on.
mike@fuelsaver-mpg.com
www.fuelsaver-mpg.com |
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DavidM
United Kingdom
458 Posts |
Posted - 12 Jul 2010 : 09:16:18
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Mike
as you have already found, you aren't going to be able to do this directly with the designs in Easy-PC, because the program will always want the pcb to be 'valid' hence the auto-renumbering of components.
I can only think of 2 ways to achieve what you require.
The first is to modify the designs so that the components don't display their component names but instead display a 'Value' that you set by hand to the desired component name. Kind of long-winded to set this up, but at least you then end up with a 'composite' design that is easy to arrange on the screen before producing the final Gerbers. Note that the BOM will of course not make sense for this composite design, as that will still work off the component names unless you change the BOM report to output those special values instead.
The second method is to generate Gerbers for each of the designs, then use a CAM program - or indeed Easy-PC itself - to import those Gerbers and arrange them how they need to fit together, then generate the final composite Gerbers from there. The disadvantage here is that this works layer-by-layer so it might be kind of hard to get everything positioned so the layers of each board line up properly.
David.
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How do I combine boards?