Talk to your board house.  There is almost certainly someone
 there that has the knowledge and software to panelize a board
 for you.  At least here in the Houston area, the board houses
 that I've dealt with both personally and professionally have
 done this sort of thing for me.  But if you have a 2"x2" board,
 and you want to panelize it into 4"x6", you aren't going to have
 any waste to cut the boards apart unless this has been taken
 into consideration in the border width of the board itself.

                          Good Luck and Regards,

                                  Jim



On Wed, 05 January 2000, Lawrence Lile wrote:

>
> I've been a recent convert to Eagle PCB CAD, and even paid them  $50 for a
> registered  copy.
>
> <rant mode = ON>  I do pay my shareware bills,
>
> and I wish Jory would excommunicate all these guys offering CRACKED software
> on the PIClist! I hope that these crackers actually write some REAL software
> someday, and then get it ripped off, and then go broke making no money after
> being robbed.
>
> <rant mode = OFF>
>
> Here's my dillema.  I need to panelize a PCB - it's a 2" X 2" board and I
> need 6 of them in a 4" x 6" layout.  No problem in my old CAD systrem (which
> other than having panelization was useless).  Eagle is a great software
> package, but it does not have a panelization option.
>
> How about just copying everything over and over?  No good - I didn't buy
> enough square inches of EAGLE (crippleware, you know) to do a very big
> board.  All my designs are really tiny!
>
> I found I could monkey-wrench a panelized version by making a gerber file,
> then making another with an offset, then another with another offset, and
> using a text editor and scrunching them all together, moving blocks of stuff
> around to fix the syntax of the file.  Tedious, time consuming, and
> educational.
>
> I tried this old DOS trick:  copy gerber1.gbr  +gerber2.gbr +gerber3.gbr
> final.gbr
> which appends all the files together.  My software can read it, but I don't
> really trust it very well.  Anybody know if this would really result in a
> valid Gerber file?
>
> Is there any Gerber file editor out there that can panelize a gerber file
> without so much pain?  Same issue with a drill file?  I don't have a way of
> reading back a drill file to know if it is corrupt or not.
>
> -- Lawrence Lile

jim@jpes.com