Mouse Bite Footprints for KiCad

Mouse bites are the small perforated tabs along the edge of a printed circuit board. They let several boards be made together in a single panel and then be broken apart, and the row of small holes looks a bit like the perforation of a postage stamp. This is a set of KiCad footprints for drawing them.

The point of mouse bites is to make manufacturing simpler: the boards are produced together and separated afterwards by breaking them along the perforated line. The edge where the mouse bites were can be rough afterwards, and it may need filing or sanding to make it smooth, especially if the board goes into a case.

What is in the library

The library is a KiCad footprint library, a folder named mouse-bite.pretty. It has five mouse bite footprints and one icon footprint. Every hole is a non-plated through hole with a 0.5 mm drill.

The two measurements in a file name, in millimetres, grow from 1 mm – 3 mm to 5 mm – 10 mm, so pick the footprint that matches the size of the tab you need.

How to use it

1. Download the repository.
2. Add the folder mouse-bite.pretty to your KiCad project folder.
3. Open your project and choose the PCB editor.
4. Open the library manager under Preferences and choose Project Specific Libraries.
5. Click the folder icon, select the mouse-bite.pretty folder and click Open.
6. In the PCB editor, click the footprint icon and type mouse in the search field.
7. Select your mouse bite and add it to your design.
8. Place the footprint on the edge of your PCB.
9. Connect the Edge.Cuts layer to the footprint.
10. Draw the half circles on the Edge.Cuts layer.

More KiCad from this site

The Raspberry Pi Zero W HAT template for KiCad is another set of KiCad files, with a board outline and a walkthrough for creating your own symbol.

Good to know

• The library is under the MIT licence, copyright 2024 StudioPieters.
• There is no release: download the repository as a ZIP or clone it.

Everything is in the mouse-bite.pretty repository on GitHub.