User:Rob Kam/sandbox1/Talk:PCB front panel

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What tool and layer do I draw around the pcb with? With the pcb origin at zero, it says to set the outline for panel at zero but this would not centre the pcb to the panel unless they were the same size (not usually the case)? I'm sure there has to be an easier way, like drawing the panel over the top of the pcb, adding the holes and milling, then deleting everything from the pcb?

also I place all jacks, pots and LEDs on a mm grid so all my front panel drill measurements end up on "nice" values too.

I design all my PCBs at the postition they would have behind the panel, so typically my PCB is from 10mm to 118mm and my panel is from 0mm to 128.5. when I start on the panel, I save the _PCB.brd to _panel.brd and use jacks and pots in order to place the holes, then later I delete all the PCB parts in the schematics

here is a small gap, eagle will not make the ground pour go all the way to the edge. even if you do that on your PCB your board house might not like that and move the copper away from the milling edge


I see. Do you need a ground at all or can it just be the mask? Manage Like · Reply · 1y Vladimir Pantelic Vladimir Pantelic it can all be mask if you want. but you can use the bare copper as an additional color besides mask and silk screen

Tom Whitwell My normal method: 1. Create a duplicate of the eagle file for the PCB with pots/sockets etc 2. Delete the .sch version of the file 3. Extend the size of the PCB outline layer so it's 128.5 high and x wide 4. Replace the pots/sockets etc with the right sized vias or drill holes 5. Create gerbers 6. Edit the relevant Gerber layers in Cenon to create panel artwork 5

Vladimir Pantelic I use the dirty PCB cam file Tom Whitwell Tom Whitwell I use OSHpark cam and boards

Does anyone know of a guide to designing euro panels in eagle?, Synth DIY Facebook group, 24 February 2017

I think Befaco black panels are aluminium-core PCBs. They look great The panels for Timo's Ogre FM VCO are done that way - look great. Oh really? Pcbcart aluminium panels? They do look good then! Philip Wise had them made - apparently at pcbway

I'm using pcbway for panels, they come out pretty good How about scratches, do they happen a lot? The matte black was pretty scratched, the gloss was pretty good

I know about pcbway, but the topic was pcbcart. Around my parts they are known to make pretty good pcb-panels, compared to many others. So now offering aluminium as well got my attention!

[I noticed pcbcart also do aluminum pcb's. Anyone tried them for panels?], Synth DIY Facebook group, 16 February 2017

When you come up with clever anti-fingerprint finish on cheap pcb-panel and they print a serial number on it.:

If you ASK not to print the serial number of the job, they usually accepts.

i had other ones done at elecrow and they never printed on it.

DirtyPCBs explicitly states that they're going to put a serial number somewhere and there's no way around it. Your best bet is probably designing it backwards so the bottom is the front and the top is the back.

All the super cheap PCB places I know and use will print the serial on the bottom silk if you ask.

Andrew Nonlinearcircuits I use allPCB, best place so far.......but things change. Anyway with many manufacturers you need to ask them to put the mfg code on the bottom of the PCB, There is a special requests box on the order page to put this in. Make sure you type it in caps and as few words as possible, even then it is still not 100%. The better option is to just design your panel on the bottom of the PCB, that is what i do

Dave Hamara 23 April 2017 Very impressed with these aluminum panels from PCBWay.com Custom PCB Prototype & Production Service. I just laid them out in my PCB software (I use KiCad, but you could do it just as easily in Eagle) using non-plated holes and the artwork on the silkscreen layer, then sent them the gerbers with the drill file, board outline/cutout layer, a blank top copper layer, a blank top solder mask layer, and the top silkscreen layer. They have a bunch of choices for solder mask and silkscreen colors, and as you can see, the resulting panels look fantastic Very affordable, too - this panel is HUGE at 15.6" x 6.4", and 5 of them cost me $126, including shipping.

Word of warning though, these are about the level of quality you'd expect from the price and the fact that they're from a PCB company, not a panel company. They're very precisely made and the screen-printing is nice and clear, but every single one of my panels has scuffs and at least one blemish. My rear panels also all came with an extra little "L" shaped bit of screenprint, but luckily it's covered up by the bezel of my enclosure.

Honestly, it doesn't bother me at all. At arm's length, and in most lighting situations, it looks great. It's only when you really start inspecting that it betrays its price point.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/synthdiy/permalink/10154591990021313/

Filip Pietruszewski 6 September 2017 I want to get some PCB panels made for some modules, but Dirty PCBs keeps putting their batch ID right on the front. Anyone have a work around? https://www.facebook.com/groups/synthdiy/permalink/10154979943051313/

Mirror everything and they will put the ID on the rear

Design so the 'front' of the panel is the bottom layer, when they place the batchID on the top layer it will be hidden inside the enclosure

The board house will add three tiny numbers to your board: batch ID, a customer number, and our PCB ID.

You have a "top" layer and a "bottom" layer, it sounds like 90% of the time they put their stamp on the "top" layer.

So if you make the bottom layer your "panel front" you should be good. That's the advice I get from this thread, anyway.

about dirty pcb: mirror and make sure you have something in the top silk, otherwise you still have a chance that it ends up on the back where you don't want it

A few in my Github, or easy to make gerbers from Eagle files: https://github.com/TomWhitwell

Mine are usually optimised for 'normal' PCB fabrication (Seeed, OSHPark etc)

Hey, just wanted to thank the OP for this idea. I just had my first run of aluminum PCB panels made and they look fantastic. I can't recommend this service to anyone who's a real perfectionist, as every single panel I received had some level of flaw on it (scuffs, soldermask blemishes) but it looks 1000% better than anything I could make at home and it's cheaper than outsourcing anywhere else. These are Monet panels: they look really nice from a few feet away, but when you get up close, it's a bit messy.


https://www.modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=169735&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=25 

2mm FR4 they are just as strong as aluminium but have the advantage of being transparent and conductive if you want.

https://www.reddit.com/r/synthdiy/comments/6pxwe2/how_do_you_go_about_faceplates/


I design mine in Eagle.

I think the free version of Eagle only goes up to 80 x 100mm, which isn't big enough for a Euro panel (needs to be 128.5mm tall) so you need the €112 version.

Panel sizes are here: http://www.doepfer.de/a100_man/a100m_e.htm

The panel design is pretty straightforward. Set 'units' to millimetres, use Vias for socket & pot holes, copper pour on the back, make everything GND so it connects together. I use parallel boards, so note down the exact positions on the main PCB, add a bit for the bottom and the side and transfer them to the panel PCB. Use drill holes for LEDs (where you don't want a metal ring around the hole).

The fiddly bit is the artwork. You can label things easily using the text function in Eagle, but to do anything more complicated you'll need to either import a bitmap https://learn.adafruit.com/creating-accurate-footprints-in-eagle/impor ting-the-bitmap-into-eagle or use something like Svg2Poly https://github.com/cmonr/Eagle-ULPs

The bitmap import is simpler, but setting the right DPI is a bit tricky. OSHPark and Seeed are the two places I use, and they display bitmaps very differently. The Svg2Poly import gives really good crisp results, but is fiddly to use for anything beyond fonts.

Mikrophonie has a raw PCB panel with gold-plated copper writing - you lay a tStop polygon all over the top, and design your artwork in the Top layer. The circle thing is a printed inductor (for decorative and texture purposes only)

The nicest PCB panels (MakeNoise) have matte soldermask - I don't know much about that because neither OSHPark or Seeed do it - I think PCBCart might.

You can download various PCB panels in the projects on my Github to poke about and see how they work: https://github.com/TomWhitwell

https://www.modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=147635&start=all&postdays=0&postorder=asc

My experience is that I've had some reasonable & some bad batches (from the same place for some years, PCB-Cart). For several years I have put a note 'Please avoid scratches/blemishes - these are display panels', but have taken to emailing them also after placing an order to state that I will not accept excessive scratches - that upping was due to a particularly bad batch where at least 30% were unacceptable. I do order an extra 5-10% typically to be sure, but sometimes I've still had to accept a price reduction on getting a 2nd run done. (and, yes, it typically takes a while to get them to accept the problem + it can be hard to actually take photos of the errors due to lighting [maybe bad photo skills by me!])


https://www.modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=147635&start=all&postdays=0&postorder=asc

They are more flexible than aluminium panels, it's more difficult to get it completly flat unless you do 3.2mm PCB panel. With aluminium the panel will bend the PCB with the panel components soldered to it if it's not even while a PCB panel will take some of the flexing instead upon itself. Soldering the panel components after fixating them in the panel helps a lot in both cases.

The main problem we have had at RYO is the visual quality. Some cheap PCB houses use 300dpi silk screen printers and some use 600dpi. You can buy visual quality control but that usually increase the price more than just scrapping a portion of the panels.

The cheaper the manufacturer the higher risk for more and worse surface scratching also. Some light scratching will always be there on a portion of the panels unless you pay a lot.

Another advantage compared to aluminium is that you can electrically isolate jacks from the panel without using plastic barrel jacks like Doepfer, Tiptop and more.

https://www.modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=142168&highlight=


Generally all the holes you need for the jacks, pots, screws etc. should be done as vias with appropriate diameter as that will create a nice copper rim around them and will connect the back to front of the panel electrically.

The back panel should be 1 large ground plane without the solder mask - a filled rectangle in the bStop layer in eagle (so it's basically all covered in exposed copper). It will help you ground all the pots/jacks etc. Have a look at the way it is done for Mikrophonie.

For the front of the panel you have a couple of options.

You can either go without solder mask (so the fStop layer covered with a filled rectangle) and use the actual copper layer (Top) for writing. That's how Mikrophonie's done. It's quite bare but also rather cool.

The other option is to cover the whole front with a solder mask (a filled rectangle the size of the board in the tStop layer) and use the tName silkscreen layer for all the text.

https://www.modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=142168&highlight=

For prototypes, standard 1.6mm wins - partly because I don't think it is worth the great increase in price to go to thicker. In production, I use 3.2mm - haven't tried anything between 1.6 & 3.2 actually..

1.6mm can flex a bit, but it depends a lot on the design -- my initial designs (5+ years ago) had perpendicular PCBs -- maybe it is now better with my parallel pcbs.. just tried 'pressing' a proto build - minimal -- and you're never going to break the panel by pressing like that anyways. So, probably you'll be fine with 1.6mm.

https://www.modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=142168&highlight=


- design in [urlhttp://www.abacom-online.de/uk/html/frontdesigner.html]FrontDesign er[/url] - export the outlines as milling data (HPGL .plt files) - use EagleHPGL to convert from .plt to a script for Eagle (I think I got this from the www.cadsoft.de website, but can't find it now - it is cranky, but works) - run the script in Eagle and you've then got a .brd design (you have to adjust the line widths afterwards) - I also then add a top-layer fill so there's copper on the topside (under the soldermask) - send the .brd file to (my choice) www.pcbcart.com -- this only works out to be reasonably priced for c.15+ units (more is even better, obviously). - note that you want the THICK 3mm PCB material - the standard 1.5mm is far too flexible for modular panels. You can specify colours both for the soldermask and for the silk-screen -- not an endless range of colours, but enough....

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PostPosted: Fri Apr 14, 2017 6:22 am Post subject: Reply with quote Add User to Ignore List I've had panels made by PCBWAY in China, because one of their options for the PCB Material is.... Aluminium.

All I sent them were the following standard Gerbers:

- Front Copper - Front Solder Mask - Front Silk Screen - Edge Cuts - Non-plated through hole drill file

Use the Solder Mask as the base colour, with the silk screen for any legends / graphics etc.

I haven't tried it, but I guess if you left off the Solder Mask & Front Copper you'd get bare aluminium. I may try that one day.

Colours for solder masks and silk screens are limited, so Black Solder Mask plus White Silk Screen (or vice versa) are probably best, though they also do Red, Green, Yellow, Blue, Purple, Matt Green & Matt Black solder masks too

Only black or white for the silk screen though.

I used Kicad, which I use for PCB Layout.

It's a slightly fiddly process, as you have to import the text as a component footprint.

There are plenty of tutorials on the net, but essentially the process is as follows:

1) Create a high resolution .BMP (bitmap) image using a white graphic on a black background (ie negative image). I use the GIMP, which gives you very fine control over fonts, size, orientation etc.

2) Within Kicad, use the Bitmap2Component tool, and load this image

3) within the 'Original Picture' tab start increasing the DPI settings, which will gradually shrink your image until the resulting image is the correct size for your panel / pcb

4) export it as a .kicad_mod file with a suitable name

5) In the footprint editor choose or create a library for your imported graphics, and import and update this footprint in the current library

6) In pcbNew you can then use the Place Footprint tool to place the graphic onto your PCB.

It sounds a bit convoluted but once you've done it a few times it's pretty straightforward and means you can gradually build up a library of graphical images that you can just place on your designs, such as on the silkscreen of this PCB:


https://www.modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=180347&start=all&postdays=0&postorder=asc

- in the just Black soldermask one, you can see some of the 'grain' of the PCB substrate, and I'd be interested to compare the smoothness with the version with the copper layer? Hardly any difference, certainly no improvement with copper on the front face and, arguably, slightly worse due to the plated through holes.

https://www.modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=180347&start=all&postdays=0&postorder=asc

As a result of this thread, I had these front panels made by PCBWay.

They are 2mm FR-4. The lettering is made using the Top Copper layer, with Immersion Gold plating, and a black solder mask.

Gerbers were made using KiCad, the process being roughly as follows:

1) Use PCBNew to specify the edges and holes, including the rectangular cut-out

2) Draw the whole of the front panel graphic in Inkscape exactly to scale, which means you can use whatever fonts you want, flow text around objects (see the 0-9 scale). The image needs to be White on Black

3) Save this as a high-resolution .BMP file. I used 700dpi, but I think Kicad will let you go up to 1,000 dpi.

4) Use Bitmap2Component to create a .kicad_mod footprint file

5) By default, Kicad will import the graphic onto the Front SilkScreen layer, so edit this file with a text editor, and search and replace all occurrences on F.SilkS with F.Cu save it with a suitable name (Eg front_panel_top_copper.kicad_mod)

6) repeat the search and replace, but this time change all occurrences of F.SilkS to F.Mask save it with a suitable name (eg front_panel_solder_mask.kicad_mod)

7) Place these two 'footprints' on the board in PCBNEW, making sure they are aligned with each other, the holes etc.

8) Plot out the Gerbers. I generated the following:

- Edge Cuts - Top Copper - Top Solder Mask - Non-plated through hole drill file

That's it. I didn't on this occasion, but I understand I could have used svg2mod to directly import the Inkscape .svg file onto the Copper layer rather than go through the BMP and using bitmap2component

SVG2MOD that'll take an SVG and convert it straight into a KiCad footprint, letting you specify the resulting layer as you go.

https://www.modwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=180347&start=all&postdays=0&postorder=asc


if relevant? external links

Mod Wiggler forum

Was Panels (outsourcing)

[2]

  1. ^ Is the world ready for PCB front panels?, Mod Wiggler forum, May 2009
  2. ^ PCBs as Front Panels ?, Mod Wiggler Forum, Apr 2017
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