kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Matthew Beckler <matthew.beckler@xxxxxxxxx>]

I have some python code to convert an SVG image to a Kicad pcb module
silkscreen, however it doesn't work great for polygons that contain cutouts
(such as the holes in the characters A, B, Q, etc). It seems like pcbnew
does not support having cutouts inside a filled region. I've noticed that
bitmap2component works around this by creating infinitely-thin connections
from a polygon's outside edge to each of the cutouts, effectively
connecting each cutout with the exterior.

The code isn't great, but here's what I've got so far. It's based on the
Egg-Bot code (used for driving a two-axis plotter based on SVG files), and
I need to figure out what sort of licensing is needed for it based on all
the library files used.
https://github.com/wayneandlayne/svg2kicadmod

Right now you need to pick the desired width and/or height in mm when you
run the script, so if you need different sizes of your logo then you need
to create several .kicad_mod files. Eventually it would be really great to
have support for changing the scaling of the rasterized logo right within
pcbnew, so I perhaps having a python plugin for fancy SVG-based board
graphics would be neat.

-Matthew Beckler
Co-founder and Engineer
W&L


On Fri, Jul 10, 2015 at 11:42 AM, Tomasz Wlostowski <
tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 10.07.2015 18:31, jp charras wrote:
>
> > AFAIK, boost::polygon is used only to cleanup and mainly to fracture the
> > polygons which are created by potrace, and which are outlines and holes
> > inside outlines.
>
> Indeed, maybe the custom types (KPolygon) made me think it's more
> complicated.
> >
> > The main application of bitmap2component is creating logos which can be
> > printed on a silkscreen layer.
>
> Most logos come nowadays in a vector format (e.g. SVG). An ability to
> import a vector logo directly (without having to convert from vector to
> bitmap and back) would be quite useful IMHO and may supersede the
> functionality of bitmap2component.
>
> Tom
>
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