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[ANN] PCB Multiplyer (early test version)
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mgebha
Hi,
often when I finish a design with KiCad, I want to print more than one of them on a single board. Of course one can do that by copying and moving the whole content in PCBnew. This has some disadvantages however: - Selecting and placing the desired content is error-prone and sometimes a lot of trial and error. - Every time you make changes to the design, you have to start over with copying and moving. - It is not easy find the best fit to a certain board size and it is hard to adjust it to other sizes. So I tried to implement this function myself and ended with a little application to do the job. Screenshots: - The original board in PCBnew: - PCB Multiplyer application: - The resulting bord in in PCBnew: Note that the application is limited to rectangular designs and boards. You can download the application here: It requires a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.6 or greater. Start by double clicking pcbmultiplyer.jar. This a an early test version that is fully functional, free for non-commercial use and comes with no warranty of any kind. It might be released as open source under CPL in future. Please let me know what you think about it and also let me know if you find any bugs. Regards Markus |
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This is a nice contribution.
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However, I would have tried to code using the same language/libs that Kicad is using in case that the developers would have liked to push this into kicad. Currently I'm doing something similar at the Gerber level using the excellent gerbmerge () .. however having the possibility of doing that at PCBnew level opens interesting possibilities. Thanks for sharing this and I hope you'll make it a libre software. Take Care, Fabio Varesano On 01/23/2011 03:40 PM, mgebha wrote:
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mgebha
I have implemented some more features and brushed up the existing application:
In the first version, you were only able to select a target board size and the software tried to fit as many designs as possible. In the new version you can also specify the multiples in x- and y-direction and the software will create the result and calculate the target board size itself. Also the layout preview is now updated on the fly while you change the settings. So you can more quickly find out good setups. Screenshot: Regards, Markus |
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mgebha
Good point! If someone wants to port this to another platform, I would gladly make the relevant parts of the code available.
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In the first place it was only a proof of concept. I did not expect it to turn out that well in such short time. --- In kicad-users@..., Fabio Varesano <fabio.varesano@...> wrote:
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Andy Eskelson
Perhaps this highlights that some form of inbuilt scripting / macro
functionality within pcbnew might be something to be looked into. Andy On Sun, 23 Jan 2011 21:25:07 -0000 "mgebha" <markus@...> wrote:
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Thank you Markus for this interesting utility.
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When needed, it will save a lot of time and clicks :) I run it as a test on my Windows 7 Home Basic. Its learning curve is 1 or 2 seconds at most :) Kerim --- In kicad-users@..., "mgebha" <markus@...> wrote:
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mgebha
So here is a major update to the PCB Multiplyer software:
Screenshot: Changes include: - Enormous speedup - Bugfix: pads were not rotated in 1.1. This was only a problem with non-uniform pad shapes. - Assigned keyboard shortcuts to most controls - you can now specify the file to be loaded as command line argument - Lots of minor improvements Also the download package now contains the source code under CPL. Regards, Markus |
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This is very impressive could you add the link to kicad links on the main page I beleive it is a wiki.
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I would like to try this with my boards I first would want to get 3 test ones from dorkbotpdx. also I would need to get 16 or at least 8 sensor pad circuit boards. there round ish because there EMG active non-contact electrodes. So you can see how if your program put a bounding box around the pcb everything would seem rectangular. But still amazing work I would like to have my boards cranked out by the sheet and pick and place assembled with a hotair oven or something some day. Here is a link to my open source hardware design I like how your sharing your design I am sharing mine. The updated shcematics and boards are under downloads NCP_Base8.zip --- In kicad-users@..., "mgebha" <markus@...> wrote:
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