from Hacker News

Making nice-looking and interactive diagrams for your PCBs

by phsilva on 1/10/22, 6:41 AM with 18 comments

  • by PragmaticPulp on 1/12/22, 6:30 PM

    This is a well-executed tool.

    I hesitate to criticize, but I think it's a step backwards for usability in the current form. Having to individually mouse over every single pin to see what it does is the least efficient way to find the pin I need.

    Ideally, the tool would show all of the pin short labels and then allow me to hover over to highlight connected nets and show the full description.

  • by jupake on 1/12/22, 8:09 PM

    This is a very impressive start. It has the potential to be extremely useful. I would suggest making this into something like codepen, but for PCBs. Then makers and professionals alike can copy-paste unique urls around the internet of their circuits diagrams and ideas, forum posts, etc, etc. Could have lots of utility in education as well.

    And starting from the open source KiCAD community is just gold. Well done.

  • by soneil on 1/12/22, 6:14 PM

    Is there a good way to find a pin when I know what I'm looking for?

    Say I'm looking for 3v3. I can tick pins, then power, and .. about a third of the pins on the board are highlighted. Then I need to hover over each one to see which it is, like a 2004 dhtml menu.

  • by IshKebab on 1/12/22, 6:16 PM

    Extremely neat. It does make a couple of use cases much harder though, like finding a GPIO pin that isn't needed for I2C or whatever. The diagram at the top is very well colour coded so I'm not sure I agree that it's too much information at once.

    I definitely agree it breaks down when you have as many pins in random places as the example board though. I would provide both if you have time.

    Excellent work anyway!

  • by alias_neo on 1/12/22, 6:28 PM

    Can I print it?

    I love the pighixxx diagrams because they sit on my desk while I'm working on a board; the board atop the printed sheet and I can make notes on it.

  • by thot_experiment on 1/12/22, 10:36 PM

    Nice work!

    A mirror-mode for the flipside would be very useful. I often mirror one side of a board when I'm trying to understand exactly what's going. It makes it much easier to understand where traces go if you don't have to perform the flip step in your mind, especially when reverse engineering a board.

    I also agree with the other posters about the usefulness of an exploded see-all-the-pins-at-once view.

  • by SavantIdiot on 1/12/22, 7:27 PM

    Searching for jumpers, bridges, wire annotations or anything really in PDF schematics is such a PITA (CTRL-F then look for the tiny blue highlight). It would be great if MCU vendors would do something like this for their entire eval boards' schematics.

  • by dusted on 1/13/22, 7:00 AM

    I'm building a Commodore 64 at the moment, and the interactive BOM here is a very very helpful tool, it's the same idea as this one, but includes traces and part descriptions: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://raw.githubusercontent...

  • by spfzero on 1/13/22, 1:16 AM

    Pretty cool and useful. I wonder why you wouldn't extract the assembly layer for the footprint outlines though, rather than needing to draw things. That way, if you were OK with that look, you're done, and if you wanted something more detailed you could just update the footprint and then it would be part of that footprint in your library for future uses.

  • by sircastor on 1/13/22, 9:17 AM

    I was just looking at this tool the other day. I was likewise inspired by the Pighixxx art and was looking to see what tools were out there to generate such a thing (pighixxx is all done in illustrator)

    I think I’d like something that could import brds, I also just take a pin list and a package name and generate the pins.

  • by nrclark on 1/12/22, 11:50 PM

    Very cool, and useful. I'll try it out on my next PCB.