PcbDraw v1.0 Released — What’s New?
PcbDraw is a tool that allows you to create beautiful drawings of your PCBs designed in KiCAD. Today, we released version 1.0 of the tool. What’s new?
PcbDraw was created during a single-night coding session on Apr 13, 2017, to address my need to have nice drawings of my PCB that I use for documentation and promotion. It works by disassembling the SVG files produced by KiCAD, transforming them, and assembling them such that they form a nice diagram.
Back then, the whole tool started as a small, single-purpose script. However, once it got users, more and more functionality was glued in, the complexity increased the code quality meanwhile steadily decreased. We also relied on ImageMagick for file format conversions. ImageMagick is hard to configure and easy to misconfigure, so we often received bug reports showing that the conversions aren’t working properly.
Even PcbDraw can generate nice drawings; it requires you to have hand-draw footprint libraries. And let’s be honest, this is a high threshold for many users. Most of them would be completely happy with 3D rendering.
