Inserting graphics into the silkscreen?

Discussion:

Naresh

2013-07-15 22:13:42 UTC

Is there a way to import at graphic image, even if at just 1 intensity level, into the silkscreen layer?

If Kicad doesn't offer this, is there still a way maybe to convert an image into postscript data and insert the postscript data into the silkscreen file?

If Kicad doesn't do this, is there some software available that can add a graphic image by this or any other method?

Naresh

------------------------------------

Please read the Kicad FAQ in the group files section before posting your question.
Please post your bug reports here. They will be picked up by the creator of Kicad.
Please visit http://www.kicadlib.org for details of how to contribute your symbols/modules to the kicad library.
For building Kicad from source and other development questions visit the kicad-devel group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-develYahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-users/

<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-users/join
(Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
kicad-users-digest-***@public.gmane.org
kicad-users-fullfeatured-***@public.gmane.org

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
kicad-users-unsubscribe-***@public.gmane.org

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Andy Eskelson

2013-07-15 22:23:11 UTC

Permalink

Doesn't the bitmap2component tool do what you want?

(Camera icon 5th one along the top of the main kicad screen)

If that puts things on the wrong layer the it's fairly simple to edit
the file to change that if necessary.

Andy

On Mon, 15 Jul 2013 22:13:42 -0000

Post by Naresh
Is there a way to import at graphic image, even if at just 1 intensity level, into the silkscreen layer?
If Kicad doesn't offer this, is there still a way maybe to convert an image into postscript data and insert the postscript data into the silkscreen file?
If Kicad doesn't do this, is there some software available that can add a graphic image by this or any other method?
Naresh

------------------------------------

Please read the Kicad FAQ in the group files section before posting your question.
Please post your bug reports here. They will be picked up by the creator of Kicad.
Please visit http://www.kicadlib.org for details of how to contribute your symbols/modules to the kicad library.
For building Kicad from source and other development questions visit the kicad-devel group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-develYahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-users/

<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-users/join
(Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
kicad-users-digest-***@public.gmane.org
kicad-users-fullfeatured-***@public.gmane.org

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
kicad-users-unsubscribe-***@public.gmane.org

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Robert

2013-07-16 08:54:17 UTC

Permalink

I've not had much success with that. Looking in
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-users/files/ I see:

DXF2KiCad (a new one that I haven't tried)
PBM2EMP (good for producing rasters from bitmaps)
SVG2Kicad (good for vector drawings so long as the use of the SVG format
isn't too complicated)
TTConv (A buggy DXF converter that may do the job)

Regards,

Robert.

Post by Andy Eskelson
Doesn't the bitmap2component tool do what you want?

--
() Plain text email - safe, readable, inclusive.
/\ http://www.asciiribbon.org/

------------------------------------

Please read the Kicad FAQ in the group files section before posting your question.
Please post your bug reports here. They will be picked up by the creator of Kicad.
Please visit http://www.kicadlib.org for details of how to contribute your symbols/modules to the kicad library.
For building Kicad from source and other development questions visit the kicad-devel group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-develYahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-users/

<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-users/join
(Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
kicad-users-digest-***@public.gmane.org
kicad-users-fullfeatured-***@public.gmane.org

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
kicad-users-unsubscribe-***@public.gmane.org

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

László Monda

2013-07-16 10:03:54 UTC

Permalink

Don't forget http://mondalaci.github.io/dxf-to-svg-to-kicad-pcb-converter/ -
when it comes to DXF, SVG and KiCad I don't think you have any better
options.

**
I've not had much success with that. Looking in
DXF2KiCad (a new one that I haven't tried)
PBM2EMP (good for producing rasters from bitmaps)
SVG2Kicad (good for vector drawings so long as the use of the SVG format
isn't too complicated)
TTConv (A buggy DXF converter that may do the job)
Regards,
Robert.

Post by Andy Eskelson
Doesn't the bitmap2component tool do what you want?

--
() Plain text email - safe, readable, inclusive.
/\ http://www.asciiribbon.org/

--
LÃ¡szlÃ³ Monda <http://monda.hu>

Robert

2013-07-16 10:24:33 UTC

Permalink

Heh, I sent off my email and then saw yours about the new converter :).

It looks very promising, László, and it's most welcome, but it doesn't
(yet) cover all the necessary permutations. Specifically it needs
export to various kicad formats including modules and schematic
libraries (I'm desperately trying to avoid the terms .mod, .emp, and
.lib, because I know it's currently all change there :)). Secondly it
doesn't allow scaling, and thirdly it doesn't handle bitmaps. Will you
be addressing these needs? It would be really nice to see this issue
tidied up with a one-stop, reasonably bug-free solution, but I also know
from my work on svg2kicad et al it's a lot of work.

Oh, one other bijou-problemette - when I tried it the resulting kicad
file couldn't be read by kicad. Oops. I'll try and get you a proper
bug report when I have a moment.

Regards,

Robert.

Post by LÃ¡szlÃ³ Monda
Don't forget http://mondalaci.github.io/dxf-to-svg-to-kicad-pcb-converter/ -
when it comes to DXF, SVG and KiCad I don't think you have any better
options.

Post by Andy Eskelson
Doesn't the bitmap2component tool do what you want?

--
() Plain text email - safe, readable, inclusive.
/\ http://www.asciiribbon.org/

László Monda

2013-07-16 20:29:00 UTC

Permalink

Thanks for your comments, Robert!

Post by Robert
**
Heh, I sent off my email and then saw yours about the new converter :).
It looks very promising, LÃ¡szlÃ³, and it's most welcome, but it doesn't
(yet) cover all the necessary permutations. Specifically it needs
export to various kicad formats including modules and schematic
libraries (I'm desperately trying to avoid the terms .mod, .emp, and
.lib, because I know it's currently all change there :)).

I'd think that exporting into modules is an edge case an exporting into
schematic is a corner case. Of course I can only see my needs but in most
scenarios I'd only imagine the mechanical engineer exporting the board
outline. Of course, prove me wrong by voicing your needs!

Post by Robert
Secondly it
doesn't allow scaling, and thirdly it doesn't handle bitmaps. Will you
be addressing these needs? It would be really nice to see this issue
tidied up with a one-stop, reasonably bug-free solution, but I also know
from my work on svg2kicad et al it's a lot of work.

I don't plan to support bitmaps, I'd rather support only vector graphics.
I've heard that there's a separate tool for bitmaps but haven't tried it
myself. Why not scale DXFs in AutoCAD and SVGs in Inkscape?

Post by Robert
Oh, one other bijou-problemette - when I tried it the resulting kicad
file couldn't be read by kicad. Oops. I'll try and get you a proper
bug report when I have a moment.

Sure, having your input file is key to resolve this issue. Complete SVG
support shouldn't be that hard to implement but I'm sure that complete DXF
support would be a nightmare due to the size of the DXF specification.

Post by Robert
Regards,
Robert.

Post by LÃ¡szlÃ³ Monda
Don't forget

http://mondalaci.github.io/dxf-to-svg-to-kicad-pcb-converter/ -

Post by LÃ¡szlÃ³ Monda
when it comes to DXF, SVG and KiCad I don't think you have any better
options.

Post by Andy Eskelson
Doesn't the bitmap2component tool do what you want?

--
() Plain text email - safe, readable, inclusive.
/\ http://www.asciiribbon.org/

--
LÃ¡szlÃ³ Monda <http://monda.hu>

Robert

2013-07-17 07:43:13 UTC

Permalink

Post by LÃ¡szlÃ³ Monda
I'd think that exporting into modules is an edge case an exporting into
schematic is a corner case. Of course I can only see my needs but in most
scenarios I'd only imagine the mechanical engineer exporting the board
outline. Of course, prove me wrong by voicing your needs!

It is in fact the way I always do it. For me the most common
requirement is to have a drawing of the part into which I'm supposed to
fit the PCB. This drawing will change on a regular basis, so I need to
be able to change it easily in kicad, and that means having it as a
library item. Often in that library (which is obviously
project-specific), I'll end up with several customer drawings, as the
various parts of their design get produced. I've not yet had to import
into EESchema, but that's mainly a matter of just formatting the output
string differently (though one package supports rectangles and one
doesn't, IIRC, requiring a bit of extra coding), so I decided it made
sense to do it whilst everything was fresh in my mind.

Post by LÃ¡szlÃ³ Monda
I don't plan to support bitmaps, I'd rather support only vector graphics.
I've heard that there's a separate tool for bitmaps but haven't tried it

I just think it would be nice to have all this stuff in one place, since
the issue comes up time and again. I was planning to combine together
the various converters I have worked on. You're welcome to use the
source code from PBM2MOD, if it helps (or is there a way of getting your
server to run PBM2MOD in background?).

Post by LÃ¡szlÃ³ Monda
myself. Why not scale DXFs in AutoCAD and SVGs in Inkscape?

Because sometimes I find that the scaling in the drawing is weird, and
it's just nice to avoid going via yet another package to sort it out.
If you have a look in svg2kicad you'll see I adopted absolute scaling to
try and get the SVG to the correct scale, but then I added relative
scaling after I found that some packages exported the wanted part of the
SVG offset relative to some arbitrary bounding box, so yes my drawing
would be 100mm wide as requested, but it was the bounding box that ended
up 100mm wide and the wanted part of the drawing would therefore be be
(say) 53mm wide.

Post by LÃ¡szlÃ³ Monda
Sure, having your input file is key to resolve this issue. Complete SVG
support shouldn't be that hard to implement but I'm sure that complete DXF
support would be a nightmare due to the size of the DXF specification.

I'm interested to here you say that. Maybe you found a nice library to
convert the incoming SVG into primitives for you, but when I discovered
that svg2kicad choked on some files further research showed that the
document I had been working from only showed a tiny subset of the
possibilities. Since I was trying to keep the code to a minimum so it
was easy for others to use and change, I elected to find ways of
simplifying the SVG rather than trying to support all the possibilities
SVG offers.

Regards,

Robert.
--
() Plain text email - safe, readable, inclusive.
/\ http://www.asciiribbon.org/

------------------------------------

Please read the Kicad FAQ in the group files section before posting your question.
Please post your bug reports here. They will be picked up by the creator of Kicad.
Please visit http://www.kicadlib.org for details of how to contribute your symbols/modules to the kicad library.
For building Kicad from source and other development questions visit the kicad-devel group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-develYahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-users/

<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-users/join
(Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
kicad-users-digest-***@public.gmane.org
kicad-users-fullfeatured-***@public.gmane.org

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
kicad-users-unsubscribe-***@public.gmane.org

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

László Monda

2013-07-19 21:29:07 UTC

Permalink

Just for the record in the meantime Robert sent me his DXF file and I fixed
the related bug so now his file gets converted to KICAD_PCB flawlessly.

Now I can see your use case (which surely differs from mine). AFAIK the
new KiCad module format closely resembles the board format. If so, it'll
be fairly easy to make this feature happen *in the future*.

I don't plan to support bitmaps, I'd rather support only vector graphics.

Post by LÃ¡szlÃ³ Monda
I've heard that there's a separate tool for bitmaps but haven't tried it

I try to deliberately avoid to run anything on the server side. I prefer
to serve only static resources, that is HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This has
the lovely side-effect of being able to simply upload your stuff to any
free service, offload processing to the client and foget to care with and
maintain server-side stuff. I surely prefer GitHub for such hosting
purposes.

Combining all these tools is most welcome! Doing it as a webapp would
involve reading the input image, iterating its pixels and placing or not
placing dots into the board or module output format. That being said I'm
wondering what graphics primitives are used for dots in KiCad in such a
scenario. I would think about miniature circles or super-short lines.

myself. Why not scale DXFs in AutoCAD and SVGs in Inkscape?
Because sometimes I find that the scaling in the drawing is weird, and
it's just nice to avoid going via yet another package to sort it out.
If you have a look in svg2kicad you'll see I adopted absolute scaling to
try and get the SVG to the correct scale, but then I added relative
scaling after I found that some packages exported the wanted part of the
SVG offset relative to some arbitrary bounding box, so yes my drawing
would be 100mm wide as requested, but it was the bounding box that ended
up 100mm wide and the wanted part of the drawing would therefore be be
(say) 53mm wide.

Given that one uses a smart SVG DOM parser scaling could be surprisingly
easy by simply enclosing the content of the SVG into a scaling
transformation and the SVG DOM would yield the relevant coordinates without
any extra effort.

Post by LÃ¡szlÃ³ Monda
Sure, having your input file is key to resolve this issue. Complete SVG
support shouldn't be that hard to implement but I'm sure that complete

DXF

Post by LÃ¡szlÃ³ Monda
support would be a nightmare due to the size of the DXF specification.

No library is needed for a webapp because every recent browser can parse
SVGs into DOMs which can be easily traversed, queried and manipulated. You
may wanna take a look at
https://github.com/mondalaci/dxf-to-svg-to-kicad-pcb-converter/blob/master/scripts/svgToKicadPcb.js
to
see the whole SVG to KICAD_PCB conversion code of the webapp. Apart from
the boilerplate code of the KICAD_PCB format it's merely 100 lines.

--
LÃ¡szlÃ³ Monda <http://monda.hu>

Naresh

2013-07-16 16:52:24 UTC

Permalink

Is the SVG2Kicad converter part of Kicad that I access from a module creation menu already or do I need to download it from this groups files section?

I have the graphic created in MS Visio and can save it as .dxf or .svg or many other formats so .svg the best way to save it, right?

Naresh

Post by Robert
I've not had much success with that. Looking in
DXF2KiCad (a new one that I haven't tried)
PBM2EMP (good for producing rasters from bitmaps)
SVG2Kicad (good for vector drawings so long as the use of the SVG format
isn't too complicated)
TTConv (A buggy DXF converter that may do the job)
Regards,
Robert.

Post by Andy Eskelson
Doesn't the bitmap2component tool do what you want?

--
() Plain text email - safe, readable, inclusive.
/\ http://www.asciiribbon.org/

Robert

2013-07-16 18:43:59 UTC

Permalink

You must download it. It reads SVG files only, and only a limited
subset of SVG. If it wont read your SVG file, export as DXF and go via
LX-Viewer to create a simple SVG file.

Alternatively, try one of the other converters.

Regards,

Robert.

Post by Naresh
Is the SVG2Kicad converter part of Kicad that I access from a module creation menu already or do I need to download it from this groups files section?
I have the graphic created in MS Visio and can save it as .dxf or .svg or many other formats so .svg the best way to save it, right?
Naresh

Post by Andy Eskelson
Doesn't the bitmap2component tool do what you want?

--
() Plain text email - safe, readable, inclusive.
/\ http://www.asciiribbon.org/

Naresh

2013-07-17 13:21:30 UTC

Permalink

Post by Andy Eskelson
Doesn't the bitmap2component tool do what you want?

I didn't realize it was there. I couldn't find my original Visio file from years ago but I had a high res bitmap of the logo so I used the Kicad bitmap2component tool. I needed to make a negative of the image and the logo was way too big so I then used this KiCad Bitmap2Component Scaler: http://escalalibre.com/edwt/kicad_sizeConverter.php

I flipped it with this also for using on the back silkscreen layer.

It kept making a 1 pixel wide line across the top and right sides no matter how I tried to expand or crop the logo border before converting the bitmap graphic. But I could fit the border lines up in the edge of the board layout so it was still usable but annoying.

If anyone knows how to get rid of the 1 pixel wide line on 2 of the borders please let me know.

Thanks all for help and teaching me all this stuff. Is there an email address to make paypal donations to the Kicad effort?

Naresh

Post by Andy Eskelson
Doesn't the bitmap2component tool do what you want?
(Camera icon 5th one along the top of the main kicad screen)
If that puts things on the wrong layer the it's fairly simple to edit
the file to change that if necessary.
Andy
On Mon, 15 Jul 2013 22:13:42 -0000

Jacob Schmidt

2013-07-17 13:46:14 UTC

Permalink

Post by Naresh
If anyone knows how to get rid of the 1 pixel wide line on 2 of the

borders please let me know.

This answers your question, though IMHO it is terrible that this
workaround is needed.

Kicad #5 - Using custom logos in your design

Post by Naresh

Post by Andy Eskelson
Doesn't the bitmap2component tool do what you want?

I didn't realize it was there. I couldn't find my original Visio file
from years ago but I had a high res bitmap of the logo so I used the
Kicad bitmap2component tool. I needed to make a negative of the image
and the logo was way too big so I then used this KiCad
http://escalalibre.com/edwt/kicad_sizeConverter.php
I flipped it with this also for using on the back silkscreen layer.
It kept making a 1 pixel wide line across the top and right sides no
matter how I tried to expand or crop the logo border before converting
the bitmap graphic. But I could fit the border lines up in the edge of
the board layout so it was still usable but annoying.
Thanks all for help and teaching me all this stuff. Is there an email
address to make paypal donations to the Kicad effort?
Naresh

yann jautard

2013-07-17 07:33:40 UTC

Permalink

Post by Naresh
Is there a way to import at graphic image, even if at just 1 intensity
level, into the silkscreen layer?
If Kicad doesn't offer this, is there still a way maybe to convert an
image into postscript data and insert the postscript data into the
silkscreen file?
If Kicad doesn't do this, is there some software available that can
add a graphic image by this or any other method?
Naresh

I personally have a different approach on this : I don't try to import
graphics in Kicad, but I add them to the silkscreen layer after creating
it with Kicad.

I plot my silkscreen layer as SVG in kicad, then open it in inkscape and
add all the stuff I need with a quite convenient interface.

Of course you can't with my method turn it back into gerber files, but
when you do your silkscreen at home, the SVG file is just fine for printing.

This way, you can even do colored silkscreen.

Like this one :
Loading Image...

Loading Image...