Last week I completed the SAO flower badge redrawing task, making a complete KiCad project. Most of the SAO petals are already released as KiCad projects, except for the Petal Matrix. The design features 56 LEDs arranged in eight spiral arms radiating from the center. What it does not feature are straight lines, right angles, nor parts placed on a regular grid.

Importing into KiCad

I followed the same procedures as the main flower badge with no major hiccups. This design didn’t have any released schematics, but backing out the circuits was straightforward. It also helped that user [sphereinabox] over on the Hackaday Discord server had rung out the LED matrix connections and gave me his notes.

Grep Those Positons

I first wanted to only read the data from the LEDs for analysis, and I didn’t need the full Kicad + Python scripting for that. Using grep on the PCB file, you get a text file that can be easily parsed to get the numbers. I confirmed that the LED placements were truly as irregular as they looked.

My biggest worry was how obtain and re-apply the positions and angles of the LEDs, given the irregular layout of the spiral arms. Just like the random angles of six SAO connector on the badge board, [Voja] doesn’t disappoint on this board, either. I fired up Python and used Matplotlib to get a visual perspective of the randomness of the placements, as one does. Due to the overall shape of the arms, there is a general trend to the numbers. But no obvious equation is discernable.

Continue reading “Supercon 2024 SAO Petal KiCad Redrawing Project” →

Out of curiosity, I redrew the Supercon Vectorscope badge schematics in KiCad last year. As you might suspect, going from PCB to schematic is opposite to the normal design flow of KiCad and most other PCB design tools. As a result, the schematics and PCB of the Vectorscope project were not really linked. I decided to try it again this year, but with the added goal of making a complete KiCad project. As usual, [Voja] provided a well drawn schematic diagram in PDF and CorelDRAW formats, and a PCB design using Altium’s Circuit Maker format (CSPcbDoc file). And for reference, this year I’m using KiCad v8 versus v7 last year.

Importing into KiCad

This went smoothly. KiCad imports Altium files, as I discovered last year. Converting the graphic lines to traces was easier than before, since the graphical lines are deleted in the conversion process. There was a file organizational quirk, however. I made a new, empty project and imported the Circuit Maker PCB file. It wasn’t obvious at first, but the importing action didn’t make use the new project I had just made. Instead, it created a completely new project in the directory holding the imported Circuit Maker file. This caused a lot of head scratching when I was editing the symbol and footprint library table files, and couldn’t figure out why my edits weren’t being seen by KiCad.  I’m not sure what the logic of this is, was an easy fix once you know what’s going on. I simply copied everything from the imported project and pasted it in my new, empty project. Continue reading “Supercon 2024 Flower SAO Badge Redrawing In KiCad” →