How to set panelize output page size, and position of panel

[gwideman]

An the moment I'm making a simple one-pcb panel, with final panel size about 95mm x 116mm. Kikit does several inconvenient things when positioning the output panel.

1. It arbitrarily chooses (or accepts) A4 paper size, which it not useful in the US.
2. Kikit places the panel so that it's hanging off the top left of the page by 10 to 20 mm. It almost looks like Kikit is trying to align the top left of the panel with the Kikit origin, but it's off by a few mm in each direction.
3. The above wouldn't be too bad if it was easy to select the whole panel, and move it somewhere better. (Setting aside hazards of layers not shown at the time, and locked components...) But Kikit has positioned the board such that landmarks on the board are no longer on round-numbered grid positions. So despite positioning the original PCB at exact integer mm coordinates xxx.000, Kikit has positioned the panel at yyy.ab0 where a and b are not zero. This makes it difficult to either drag the panel to a better spot, or use the Move Exactly function. (You can select some representative features, check their properties, note their oddball positions, and devise a Move Exactly distance to compensate to get features back on-grid.)
4. Kikit copies the Aux origin from the original PCB and places it in the same location relative to Kicad's coordinates. It would be helpful if the Aux origin in the panel maintained a consistent position relative to one copy of the PCB. (I'm thinking the bottom left PCB, but I can see an argument for bottom right, or other ones.) And since KiKit has placed the panel in such an awkward non-grid location, it's not easy to reposition the panel's Aux origin to a nice position relative to the panel/board.

Is there any way to control any of these characteristics? Kikit does so much that is helpful and drudgery-eliminating, but then there are misbehaviors that really slow down those final steps.

[yaqwsx]

Hi! It is true that KiKit positions the panel on a paper rather arbitrarily. I never had a need to deal with this as for me, the panelized board was never meant to be printed, exported, etc. It is just a file for fabrication. Could you describe your use case for having a particular panel positioning and paper format?

Nevertheless; until KiCAD 6 API is out there, there is not much we can do as the developers have removed the essential API for this. I want to wait with the implementation for v6 as it is unclear how the API would look like and I would like to make the KiKit interface such that it supports both v5 and v6. Without having the knowledge of v6 API we could implement it only for v5 for now, but I risk wasting time by rewriting the module in the future.

1. once the API is out there, it shouldn't be a problem to specify paper and
2. the same goes for the panel position.
4. KiKit allows you to place the panel origin to one of the corners (see postprocessing steps in https://github.com/yaqwsx/KiKit/blob/master/doc/panelizeCli.md). If you have a different need, please, describe the use case so we can think about a solution that works for all (or at least most of) users.

Also, if you need special origin placement, you can always specify a custom post-processing step. You can extract the individual board position via panel.substrates.

[gwideman]

I understand your reluctance to waste time on work that might have to be redone to be compatible with Kicad 6, fair enough. What you're doing with Kikit is very valuable, and I don't want to see that diluted for sure.

In general, the use case for the panelized board being in a nice position on the page is so that the panel drawing can be used as the basis for instructions for later steps, for example to PCB manufacturer, or to the PnP operator or board assemblers.

Regarding your comments on number 4, I am not clear what the postprocess origin feature does. The doc says:
"origin - specify if the auxilary origin an grid origin should be placed. Can be one of tl, tr, bl, br (corners), mt, mb, ml, mr (middle of sides), c (center). Empty string does not changes the origin."

Should that be "specify WHERE auxiliary origin AND grid origin should be placed"? If so, does this command operate on both the Aux and Grid origins, and place both of them at the specified location? And what does each of those locations mean? For example, does 'tl' specifiy the top left of the panel? Or of a board (but then which one?)

I should probably just run this a few times and see what happens, but I'm short of time at the moment.

[StecklerCircuits]

Hi, I'm having the same issue as OP.
Since these boards are sent to assembly houses they will print (I make a nice PDF) the Fab drawings, that have dimensions, instructions, etc. So having the panel in a particular place on the page would help. (Also being able to select a page size, but that's easy to change by hand).
I've used both the command line and the GUI for KiCad-V6 and it works great, until I use the post:origin options then I get an error.

An error occurred: 'BOARD' object has no attribute 'SetAuxOrigin'
No output files produced

I try and set an origin in either the source file or in the output file and nothing helps.
I've got version 1.02 installed, am I doing something wrong? installed it wrong?

Other than that it works great.
Thanks,
-Tim

[yaqwsx]

This was resolved in v1.0.3 release (which was released today). Please update.

[yaqwsx]

All of the feature requests should be implemented in 6458178