General

There are multiple panelizers available for KiCad, but only one is suitable for easily placing multiple oddly-shaped PCBs onto a panel: the kicad-util panelizer.

You simply place the PCBs next to each other and draw lines between them on the Eco1.User layer. Then run a kicad-util command, and voila! The lines are transformed into mouse-bites.

Unfortunately, kicad-util is not compatible with the updated PCB format of KiCad 6, so the drawn lines are not converted to mouse bites anymore.

Luckily, a merge request contains the fix, but the kicad-util creator is not available anymore. Although the contributor of the merge request created his fork, the .jar file is not recompiled, so the fixed version is rather inaccessible for most users.

Given the above, I recompiled the fixed kicad-util version with the mvn package command and made the .jar file available. I use it as:

java -jar ~/bin/kicadutil.jar pcb -f=myboard.kicad_pcb panel --inset=0 --hole=0.35 --pitch=0.7 --width=2.5 --fillet=1

Recently, I’ve written dxf2svg2kicad, a user-friendly online DXF to SVG to KICAD_PCB converter, which converts:

• DXF to SVG
• SVG to KICAD_PCB (used by KiCad)
• DXF to KICAD_PCB

My tool fully runs on the client side, and the code is on GitHub.