kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo.bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 5:16 AM, Nick Østergaard <oe.nick@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 2014-11-15 0:38 GMT+01:00 Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo.bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>:
> > For over 2 years I have maintained a project for generating VRML models
> for
> > use with KiCad.
> > ( See http://kicad3dmodels.sourceforge.net. ) The code includes basic
> > objects or tools
> > which can be used to describe parts using parametric models. I think if
> the
> > source can be
> > included in KiCad then more people will use it and perhaps even
> contribute
> > to extending
> > the code. If this sounds like a good idea, let me know and I will start
> > preparing the code for
> > inclusion in KiCad. This will take some time since I will have to review
> the
> > coding style and
> > modify the CMake files to integrate well with the KiCad source.
> >
> > I would propose to add these tools to the 'utils' source directory since
> it
> > is an independent tool.
> > Initial builds would have to be optional since the code has currently
> only
> > been tested on Linux;
> > one of the reasons I would like to move the source into KiCad is to get
> more
> > feedback on
> > cross-platform builds. Hopefully the tools will eventually run on all
> > supported platforms and can
> > become a default enabled tool in KiCad. One advantage of this parametric
> > modeling is that
> > much less memory is required to produce high quality models when
> compared to
> > the current
> > popular technique of manual modeling in Wings3D + conversion to VRML. The
> > current tools for
> > example have a number of Python scripts which can generate many
> thousands of
> > models.
>
> I have not tried to check out what you have on sf.net. But how is this
> going to integrate with kicad? Is it supposed to be used as the IDF
> tools? Should this be integrated in pcbnew's GUI or? Sorry if these
> are stupid questions, but I just have a hard time to see how I can use
> this in a pcb design workflow.
>
> Nick
>

Hi Nick,

 These tools are generally not part of the KiCad workflow. Users
will only have a need for them if they make use of the 3Dviewer
or VRML export and either need a model which is already
supplied by the tools or need to create a new model. The idea
is that the tool allows users to craft new high-quality models
using Python scripts rather than Wings3D. This allows much
greater automation of the model generation while providing a
very compact (programmatic) representation of the models.
With the generation of PCB headers for example, many
hundreds of parts are generated with only a few hundred bytes
of code; with WIngs3D someone has to hand-craft a few hundred
models and carefully check the surface appearance parameters.
With this programming approach to generating models if a
mistake is spotted and fixed, then the affected scripts can be
run and thousands of models regenerated in only a few seconds;
the surface appearances are controlled using a number of
predefined material appearances so there is much greater
uniformity in the physical appearance of parametrically
generated models as compared to hand-crafted individual models.

- Cirilo