How to get single VCut between boards and frame?

[gwideman]

For one of my designs, I'm trying get Kikit to create a grid of boards separated by vcuts, with a frame around the outside, also separated by a single vcut. This seems like a key use case, yet there's no obvious way to command it to happen.

Kikit:nightly downloaded 2021-07-12.

The following almost does the right thing:

kikit panelize \
    --layout 'grid; rows: 3; cols: 4;' \
    --tabs full \
    --cuts vcuts \
    --post 'millradius: 1mm' \
    --framing 'frame; width: 5mm; space:2mm;'  \
    $pcbname.kicad_pcb       \
    PanelPCB/$pcbname"_pnl.kicad_pcb"

However, the space subparameter creates two vcuts (2mm apart) between the boards and the frame.

So how do you get a single VCut between boards edge and frame, with no additional space? maybe changing space to zero:

kikit panelize \
    --layout 'grid; rows: 3; cols: 4;' \
    --tabs full \
    --cuts vcuts \
    --post 'millradius: 1mm' \
    --framing 'frame; width: 5mm; space:0mm;'  \
    $pcbname.kicad_pcb       \
    PanelPCB/$pcbname"_pnl.kicad_pcb"

... but this results in an error message:

An error occurred: Line[None](50001000.0, 50000000.0, 50001000.0)
No output files produced

After a lot of fiddling, I discovered that, unexpectedly, this gave the desired result:

kikit panelize \
    --layout 'grid; rows: 3; cols: 4;' \
    --tabs full \
    --cuts vcuts \
    --post 'millradius: 1mm' \
    --framing 'tightframe; width: 5mm; slotwidth:1mm; space:1mm;'  \
    $pcbname.kicad_pcb       \
    PanelPCB/$pcbname"_pnl.kicad_pcb"

I don't know why this works, and I am wary of specifying things I don't want (a slot milled around the edge) just because it randomly works. (I suspect that the slot is countermanded by the 'tabs full' parameter?)

Again, if I set slotwidth and space to zero, kikit returns an error message.

Is there some simpler command to just get single vcuts between the boards, and between boards and frame?

[yaqwsx]

The first two approaches are the correct ones. You just found a bug that the full tabs do not work properly when there is a space between boards which consequently causes invalid computation of frame cuts (this is the duplicate cut you observed). Should be fixed in 045f490