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.
Author here- That is a fun workflow! One of the things we've been prototyping is a web frontend powered by circuitpainter, where you can use a mouse or pen to draw freehand traces that can be rendered as 'real' KiCad traces so that DRC can work. However, since we also have the path information, it's possible to do things such as automatically place components along the paths, which would be extremely tedious to do by hand or with existing CAD tools.
CircuitPainter came out of an effort to automate the production of large numbers of very slightly different LED boards for sculptural work, where it was worth the effort to write code to generate the boards. I used KiCad as the backend specifically so that we could use our known footprints/solderpaste masks and get a DRC pass.
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.
Very close. It's somewhat of an OpenSCAD or Processing for electrically simple circuit board design, that uses KiCad as the generating kernel. Artistic projects are the easiest to demonstrate, however we also use it for industrial applications where we need many similar variants of simple boards. You can also use its output alongside normally routed parts to automate the tedious portions of a design: https://social.v.st/@th/111646753350070002
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.
Author here- That is a fun workflow! One of the things we've been prototyping is a web frontend powered by circuitpainter, where you can use a mouse or pen to draw freehand traces that can be rendered as 'real' KiCad traces so that DRC can work. However, since we also have the path information, it's possible to do things such as automatically place components along the paths, which would be extremely tedious to do by hand or with existing CAD tools.
CircuitPainter came out of an effort to automate the production of large numbers of very slightly different LED boards for sculptural work, where it was worth the effort to write code to generate the boards. I used KiCad as the backend specifically so that we could use our known footprints/solderpaste masks and get a DRC pass.
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.
Very close. It's somewhat of an OpenSCAD or Processing for electrically simple circuit board design, that uses KiCad as the generating kernel. Artistic projects are the easiest to demonstrate, however we also use it for industrial applications where we need many similar variants of simple boards. You can also use its output alongside normally routed parts to automate the tedious portions of a design: https://social.v.st/@th/111646753350070002
Lovely.
Reminds me of CADQuery and Build123D. Being able to programatically do CAD design "normally" done with GUIs.
Thanks!
This is pretty neat! I was working on an SAO board for Defcon and this would have been really handy for that!
Add more example images to the readme
Perfect, that wouldve saved me some headaches trying to get my designs looking right. Nothing beats making the process smoother.