![]() Next point, yes, as you may have guessed, the result was not what I had originally intended. There are advantages and disadvantages, but for this task, I felt confident. Yes, I have never designed a PCB before and the last time I used Ohm’s law was in high school, but from working with PCB manufacturers and designers, you could say I have a reverse engineered understanding of PCB design. Ok, to be completely honest, I am not a complete novice. So, with Christmas around the corner, I set myself a challenge: Could an electronics novice with no PCB design experience, design and manufacture a PCB in one week? So, what better time to make a flashy PCB than now, when it just doesn’t feel festive without some colorful sparkle. I had always admired the creative (but somewhat crazy) designs of DEFCON badges and often find myself pausing for a moment to appreciate our customers’ more elaborate designs. Then, by using the Inkscape extension, the layers can be exported directly as a KiCad PCB file or even a footprint module.Ĭurious, I thought I’d try it out for myself. ![]() In brief, it involves drawing the PCB design by hand, scanning it into Inkscape and creating each of the layers. This new approach is designed specifically for KiCad, using the popular and free vector graphics editor Inkscape. But it is fiddly, and if used for elaborate PCB designs, it can produce humongous files that either crashed Gerber viewers or exceeded online fab houses’ upload limits (though this problem appears to have been resolved in the latest Eagle update). Indeed, I had heard of the popular Eagle ULP, “import.bmp,” and used it to add simple graphics to PCBs. And he was on a mission to spread the word. He then proceeded to tell us about an extension that was used to make these designs possible. What had this got to do with the red sample we were given? Marc then swiftly replied along the lines of, oh, that’s not my design. My colleague and I were pleasantly surprised but confused. Every now and then some interesting PCB art comes up, but nothing like the designs Marc had brought over. Now, over the course of working in Seeed Fusion, I have seen and reviewed the Gerber files of close to 10,000 PCB different designs. Some had wavy flowing traces, fun bold copper text and accents, and on some designs, you could barely tell that these were fully functional PCBs that were meant to be populated. Each PCB appeared as if each layer was hand drawn, by hand or using graphics design software, not like what could easily be achieved in standard PCB design packages. The visitor, Marc, arrived with a companion and began by showing us some spectacularly artistic PCB designs, nothing like the one we had spent the last hour researching. The specifics aside (we couldn’t get our heads around the science), we were satisfied that we’d done enough research for our little discussion and the scheduled time soon came. Such a direct request doesn’t come every day so, to prepare, we inspected the boards, followed the link in the silkscreen and checked out the YouTube videos and anything else we could find. ![]() He handed us a sample of the red PCB and told us they would be coming for a talk a while later. A little background.Ī couple of months ago, the big boss approached a colleague and me about a visitor who had some special PCB requirements. Ever wanted to “draw” a PCB? In this article, I attempt to draw and manufacture a pretty PCB from scratch in just one week using Inkscape, KiCad, Seeed Fusion service and a nifty Open-Source Inkscape extension, SVG2SZ.
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