We’ve all marveled at the high quality PCB artwork used within the #BadgeLife and other communities to produce eye-catching designs, but those of you who have dipped your toes in the PCB artwork water will know that it’s hardly an easy process. [Jaseg] may have an answer though with gerbolyze, his software for processing SVG files into Gerber layers or KiCAD footprints.
His impetus for building it came from disappointing experience with other scripts that simply tried to rasterise any SVG they were given, or didn’t fully support the complete SVG spec. It’s designed for minimal preprocessing, allowing for as streamlined a process as possible. It includes a bitmap vectoriser to handle everything that can be thrown at it, and the GitHub repository has full instructions including examples of the output for different settings.
This is the latest in a long progression of enhancements to the PCB art process, but it’s not by any means the first time we’ve ventured down this path. In particular [Brian Benchoff] did a lot of work on the production of multi-colour PCBs.
Niiice!
Or you can just use Fritzing which supports SVG natively as its main format. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Now way I would install Windows to use Fritzing. I´m not masochist²
It runs on Linux and macOS as well.
You lost me at “Fritzing”..
Friends don’t let friends use Fritzing.
At least not for production, still amazing to generate documentation.
Not even for documentation.
Just for nice looking pictures of colored wires sneaking around a breadboard.
Give me a proper schematic over that any day.
Looking at such a F*&^%$#@! -ing thing and then trying to figure out what parts it uses, how everything is connected and what it actually does is no fun.
It looks like you mistyped “Fritzing”. Maybe your fingers weren’t over the home row.. :)
Many people don’t realize this, because they never take more than 15 seconds to actually look, but Fritzing is perfectly capable of doing proper schematics (second tab) and PCB designs (third tab). But it doesn’t *require* you to start with them, like certain nazi cad software that doesn’t even support SVG does.
While we’re at it, lets just ship an arduino in a box