kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Matthew Beckler <matthew@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here's an excellent article by some open-source hardware folks about 
doing visual diffs on schematics and PCB layouts. They use GEDA for 
their work but 95% of the information would apply to those of us using 
KiCad. I'm currently working on a way to automatically render my gerbers 
into PNG upon commit to git/svn (for easier browsing from smartphones 
etc) as well as doing a visual diff between each version I check-in.

http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/visdiff

Cheers,
Matthew

On 2/16/2012 1:28 AM, Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> Today we transitioned from working prototypes to production orders on a version 2.0 board,
> meaning the gerbers have to
> be pretty darn close to the known working prototypes, yet you need that last little tweak
> to fix the minor issue you found in the low quantity prototype run.
>
> I did not want to do another prototype sized quantity run.  How to reach the confidence
> needed to boldly move forward?
>
> One technique I worked up this afternoon involves imagemagick and gerbv and a script.
>
> http://www.imagemagick.org/script/compare.php
>
> The above tells how two PNG files can be compared using image XORing.
>
> gerbv can be scripted from the command line to output a *.PNG file for a single layer file
> load, both old and new images pertaining to the same layer.
>
> The attached script is just a start, but it can be used to iterate through all your gerber
> layers using one old gerber layer and the matching new gerber layer file as matched pairs.
>
> It worked well enough to find a bug in the silkscreen layer for me, and I am quite excited
> about its use moving forward, and wanted to share it with all the folks on the developer's
> list so that the technique can be refined and expanded upon.
>
> I hope you find the technique useful as a starting point.
>
> Dick
>
>
>
>
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