Yea, your PCB project is nice, but -- as always -- it's a hassle to build, especially for beginners. If those count towards your target group, they'll be in big trouble if you can't provide them with a nice and shiny graphical build guide, showing not only which parts to put where, but also in what order.
I hear you whimpering "Noooo, but rendering my board with KiCAD is painful enough, I can't be bothered screenshotting the thing a dozen times", and very right you are. But fear not, KiBAR has your back!
KiBAR takes your KiCAD PCB and a list of build steps, and converts them into nicely looking, step-by-step intermediate photo renders of the assembly procedure. Fully automatic! Isn't that great?
- python-opencv (Version 4 works for me)
- KiCAD 6
- kiauto 1.6.8
Note that pcbnew_do
from kiauto is somewhat flaky, since it simulates clicking buttons in KiCAD.
Make sure that, when opening your project, no message / warning boxes or whatsoever pop up, because
they can confuse pcbnew_do
.
render.py your_pcb.kicad_pcb output_directory/ outpattern width height
output_directory
needs to exist. Your resulting images and any intermediate files are stored hereoutpattern
can be either "prefix%suffix
", in which case your files will be calledprefix01suffix
and so on, or justprefix
.width
andheight
are somewhat related to the resulting image size. Images will be slightly smaller though, due to window borders.
TODO
- This is so slow. -- Yes. This ain't a question though.
- Why is this so slow? -- Because kiauto is simulating mouse clicks in KiCAD and has ample timeouts for doing so. After all, I don't care because it's still faster than doing this by hand.