In case anyone wants to get more artsy with their traces and are also using KiCad, here's a more hands on approach to try:
Layout your parts in KiCad, but don't route any traces. Now plot the board, but instead of plotting gerbers, plot out an SVG. Then you can pull that SVG into Inkscape. You'll get just the pads of all your components, all in the right places.
There you can draw out traces by hand, connecting the pads shown. you won't have DRC or netlist checking so this best works if you really know what you're doing, but it can be quite enjoyable. I did this back in the day with a wacom tablet and lots of smoothing on paths and you can make layouts reminiscent of hand-taped boards.
When done, remove the pads and leave just your drawn traces and then save back as the same SVG, without changing anything size wise.
Then in Kicad go to Import>Graphics and pull the the SVG, 1:1, on the copper layer, and it will be right back in the right spot, with your hand drawn traces leading right into the original positioned pads. Your drills from the pads will go through the inkscape svg just fine.
Note this workflow works with any layer and any vector graphics ideas you want.
Here's the summary I gather: It's a KiCad plugin designed for artistic, electronically-simple (and probably analog?) projects. Does that sound right? Inferred from the first few docs pages.
Using code to do graphical layouts is... tedious.
In case anyone wants to get more artsy with their traces and are also using KiCad, here's a more hands on approach to try:
Layout your parts in KiCad, but don't route any traces. Now plot the board, but instead of plotting gerbers, plot out an SVG. Then you can pull that SVG into Inkscape. You'll get just the pads of all your components, all in the right places.
There you can draw out traces by hand, connecting the pads shown. you won't have DRC or netlist checking so this best works if you really know what you're doing, but it can be quite enjoyable. I did this back in the day with a wacom tablet and lots of smoothing on paths and you can make layouts reminiscent of hand-taped boards.
When done, remove the pads and leave just your drawn traces and then save back as the same SVG, without changing anything size wise. Then in Kicad go to Import>Graphics and pull the the SVG, 1:1, on the copper layer, and it will be right back in the right spot, with your hand drawn traces leading right into the original positioned pads. Your drills from the pads will go through the inkscape svg just fine.
Note this workflow works with any layer and any vector graphics ideas you want.
15+ year PCB designer here. I love this idea. I've always admired the artistry of pre-CAD hand-drawn traces. Will give this a try sometime.
Here's the summary I gather: It's a KiCad plugin designed for artistic, electronically-simple (and probably analog?) projects. Does that sound right? Inferred from the first few docs pages.
Lovely.
Reminds me of CADQuery and Build123D. Being able to programatically do CAD design "normally" done with GUIs.
Perfect, that wouldve saved me some headaches trying to get my designs looking right. Nothing beats making the process smoother.
Add more example images to the readme
This is pretty neat! I was working on an SAO board for Defcon and this would have been really handy for that!