After opening your Kicad project.pro file, you can double click the.kicadpcb file or click the “ PCBNew ” button to open your PCB editor. Plot your Kicad PCB as Gerber files. Support files for the 2020 Remoticon KiCad to Blender PCB renders workshop. CERN Open Hardware Licence v1.2. Donate before January 15 to support KiCad EDA development and KiCad Services Corporation will match your contribution dollar for dollar up to $10,000 total. Your donation helps to build the KiCad community and ensures future feature development, supports bug fixes, community engagement and the growth of KiCad as the premier Open Source EDA solution.
Generating Gerbers
Select File -> Plot from the menu to open the gerber generation tool.
At the top of the pop-up window, you’ll see the folder location for your files, click browse. Make sure you’re in your project directory.
Make a new folder called Gerbers, select it and click select folder. Click Yes if asked to use a relative path.
On the left side, you’ll see which layers from our board design we want to turn into Gerber files.
Select all the layers you need. For a simple PCB, you’ll need the
- Top and Bottom silkscreen layers
- Front and back copper
- Edge cuts
The In1 and In2 layers are only needed for four-layer boards.
Kicad Pcb Software
Make sure the front and back copper layers are checked as well as the front and back silkscreen layers. Check front mask, back mask, and edge cuts.
The mask layers show where solder mask needs to go and the edge cuts layer is our board outline with the slot cut out at the top.
It also gives us which options we need to check.
Make sure that the “Exclude PCB edge layer from other layers” is checked. We want the part reference designators to show up on the board so leave that checked. But we don’t want the values to be printed, so uncheck “Plot footprint values”.
Click 'Plot' and the Gerber files will be generated and saved in the Gerbers folder.
Generating Drill file
Click “Generate Drill File“. Check the below options and leave everything else to default.
- 'Inches'
- 'Decimal format'
- 'Postscript'
Click “Generate Drill File” and you should see a message in the bottom text window indicating that new files were created.
Verify the Files
Kicad Pcb Design Tutorial Pdf
Next, click 'Close' to exit the Generate Drill File windows. All of the files should have appeared in your gerbers folder. Then select all of the files, zip them up, and upload the zip file to JLCPCB order page.
After uploading your files, you can verify the gerbers by using our Gerber Viewer.