On JLCPCB panelization and economy offer
| JLCPCB changes conditions all the time, the situation described here applies to November 2024. |
As you probably know, JLCPCB has a "Special offer" where for $2 you get 5 pieces of 10x10cm 2 layer PCBs. [1]
There are a lot of questions on the Internet about how it works with panelized PCBs. There is some vagueness in this regard on JLCPCB’s website.
First of all, the order page has panelization options ("Panel by customer", "Panel by JLCPCB"), and if you enable any of those, the price will increase. Presumably, enabling panelization will add extra work for JLCPCB’s engineers, and that does not fall into economy offering. I assume that even with "Panel by customer" the workers will manually break the panel into separate boards, and that extra manual step costs money.
Secondly, the company states they charge extra if you have several designs in one gerber ( https://jlcpcb.com/help/article/In-what-cases-will-there-be-charged-extra). However, apparently copying same design multiple times on the panel is not covered by this rule.
So the trick to have panelized PCB for $2 is to NOT use any of the panelization options, upload the panel yourself, and have only one design on the panel.
At least that is what I did with my latest order. I made a panel with same design copied 4 times, with mousebites for separation. At first I tried V-cuts, but because by PCBs were very small, the design didn’t pass initial inspection. So I was asked to change the design, I replaced V-cuts with mousebites, re-uploaded, and it passed the check with no quesitons.
I used panelization from EasyEDA, and its default option is to only copy PCB boundaries, without copying the contents. This caused no problems for the inspection.
PS. The PCB in question is a 10x10mm battery protection board for use in small projects, including those tiny batteries from TWS headphones. These batteries are roughly 10x10mm, so the PCB is designed to match.