Unique numbering for panels

[gcormier]

As my manufacturing grows, I'd love to get some traceability on the individual boards within a panel. This might let me notice that a certain position board was not built right for some reason (cold spot in the oven or something).

Right now I'm using sed in my pipeline to replace certain occurrences in the PCB. However, while I think it might be possible via command line, it might be something that could be tackled in KiKit?

My suggestion would be to look for a certain placeholder, and replace it with an incrementing number when building the panel.

In this case, <<hash>> is my git hash for the commit handled by my pipeline. <<pid>> would be a number starting at 1 and going up to the # of units on the specific panel. (It would obviously repeat between panels.) Another more advanced option could be to replace something with the actual row,col position of that board in the panel.

[yaqwsx]

This proposal makes perfect sense. We already support variables in text, so populating text in board isn't hard. I think using regular KiCAD variables and baking them during panelization makes sense. I am thinking about using different variable realization for different boards in the panel. All UI I can think of seems cluttery, but we could do one of two ways:

• use only text plugins,
• supply JSON file with dictionary from board sequential number to dictionary of variable realizations.

[gcormier]

For me (and maybe to start?), a simple incremental counter is all that I need.

A dictionary/lookup could also work, or a CSV file as input?