How to place tabs in Python

[ahalekelly]

The battery example is the only example code for the python library, but it uses the layerToTabs function which no longer exists, and the boardSubstrate.tab function isn't well documented. The CLI is very well documented, but the python documentation is often ambiguous to someone not familiar with this software about the exact types for the arguments the functions take and what they return. Can someone write an example using the boardSubstrate.tab function or annotation footprints to generate tabs in python?

[yaqwsx]

The battery example uses the latest stable. The tab generation algorithm is reworked from scratch and works completely differently.

The tabs are generated in three steps:

• create an annotation. Basically, a vector pointing to the edge in the direction of the tab. This can either be created automatically, or the user can supply it (see annotation source in documentation and annotation example)
• a partition line is formed to detect boundaries between the boards and tabs
• the annotation is converted into tabs by shooting rays (see https://github.com/yaqwsx/KiKit/blob/master/doc/understandingTabs.md)

Based on the description; do you have a need for a custom script? Or is manual annotation enough for you?

If you need a script, I haven't managed to write a proper guide for it. But you can basically follow the step in panelize.

[ahalekelly]

Wow thanks for the fast reply! The only reason I need a script is because I'm panelizing non-rectangular boards and need to be able to specify their relative positions. I'm not sure why I thought layerToTabs wasn't supported in v0.7, but it looks like tweaking the battery example will work.

[yaqwsx]

You can consider using annotations in v0.99 - it is much more convenient:

[ahalekelly]

Yeah that's what I was referring to in my original post, but when I ran my script on the nightly build no tabs got generated?

Anyway, I got it done with v0.7, thank you for all the work you put into this tool! The panelization tool I used before required doing everything over with every board revision and didn't have nearly as much customization options.