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License: GPL-3.0-or-later REUSE status

DEPRECATION Warning

We recommend to use the formidable KiBot tool instead.

It can generate much more then just Gerbers and 2D renders of the PCBs.

Introduction

These are scripts to help you generate files out of KiCad (electronics) projects.

More specifically, it allows you to generate:

  • Gerber & drill files
  • PNG renders of the PCB (made from the Gerber & drill files)

Why should I use this?

If you host your KiCad based electronics designs in a git repo, you may be storing the generated files in the repo as well. That however, comes with the following drawbacks:

  • the repo size increases unnecessarily, especially with binary files like PNGs
  • when accessing the repo, one never knows if the generated files are really generated from the latest version of the sources

When able to auto-generate these files, one can do it in a CI job (available to every repo on GitHub and GitLab out of the box), and refer to the generated file on the projects pages site.

How does it work?

Install Prerequisites

  • BASH
  • git
  • Python
  • pcb-tools (a Python library)

on a regular Debian based Linux, you can install all of this with:

sudo apt-get install bash python3-pip
pip install pcb-tools

Get the tool

In the repo of your project in which you want to use this tool, which would be one that supports *.kicad_pcb files, you would do this to install this tool (in the project root dir):

pip install pcb-tools
mkdir -p doc-tools
git submodule add https://github.com/osegermany/kicad-pcb-generate-doc-tool.git doc-tools/kicad-pcb-generate

NOTE
There might be a tool to automate this in a more user friendly way, comparable to a package manager like Oh-My-ZSH or apt.

Run

This will generate the PCB derived artifacts for all KiCad PCBs in the repo:

doc-tools/kicad-pcb-generate/generate_sources
doc-tools/kicad-pcb-generate/generate_output

Output can be found under the build directory.