Tag: pcb

Electronics, Software

JLCParts Falling Down To Ashes

| Jan Mrázek

About 2 years ago, I started a small and dirty project – a new catalog for the search engine for the components that JLC PCB provides for their assembly service. The motivation was really personal — I liked the dirt-cheap assembly service, but finding the suitable components for my projects was really painful. So I created JLCParts – a browser-only alternative component catalog that doesn’t need any sophisticated backend. It is just served as a static page. However, on November 25th, 2022, the service is no longer useful as JLC PCB stopped providing data.

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Electronics, Projects, Software

KiKit v1.1 — What’s New?

| Jan Mrázek

After 5 months, there is a new release of KiKit. If you don’t know KiKit, it is a tool that automates several tasks in a standard KiCAD workflow like panelization, exporting manufacturing data, handling multi-board projects, or building presentation pages.

Besides many bug fixes and small performance improvements, there is a number of new features added. Thus I decided to put them in a blog post as there’s quite a lot to discuss for a standard release note. Let’s look at them.

If you don’t have time to read the whole post and you are a regular KiKit user, I suggest scrolling through the examples pages – there are many new examples.

KiKit Promo
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Electronics, Projects, Software

Panelization & automation for KiCAD made easy: KiKit v1 finally released!

| Jan Mrázek

After half a year I finally released version 1.0 of KiKit. You might ask – what is KiKit? KiKit is a tool for automation of the manufacturing process of your boards designed in KiCAD. It makes the process fully automatic, repeatable and less error-prone. It basically allows you to:

  • Create panels of your boards (without any limitations on board shape). You just run a command and that’s it. No more hand-drawing of panels!
  • You can quickly export files for manufacturing. KiKit comes with presets for various manufacturers, so you just invoke a command and you get the correct settings for gerbers, it can also export BOM and POS files according to the manufacturer specs. It can also check DRC for you and it does not generate any files in such a case. Therefore you never submit faulty gebers for manufacturing.
  • It can also export stencils – either files for manufacturing of steel stencils or it can export a 3D model of a stencil that you can 3D print.
  • You can automatically run DRC in CI hooked in your repository – in that case you will be notified via e-mail, that you committed something, that does breaks the board.

KiKit also simplifies some parts of the workflow, where KiCAD struggles – e.g., batch hiding of references or multi-board projects.

So what is new in the current release?

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Electronics, Projects, Software

Making nice-looking and interactive diagrams for your PCBs

| Jan Mrázek

I have always liked pinout diagrams like this:

Arduino Nano Pinout. Source: http://www.pighixxx.com/test/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/nano.png
Arduino Nano Pinout. Source: http://www.pighixxx.com/test/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/nano.png

They work quite well, there is all the information and they look nice. However, they work only when you have pins on two sides of the PCB and once you squeeze too much information in it, the diagram becomes hard to follow. Also, I sometimes struggle with finding the right pin when I connect duponts to my boards — there is simply too much information presented at once.

Therefore, I created Pinion — a simple tool that will take your KiCAD board and builds a nice-looking interactive diagram. You can either present them or embed them into your websites like this:

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ESP8266

Cheap Minimal ESP8266 ESP-7/812 Breakout Board

| Jan Mrázek

ESP-12 modules are great for integration to custom product as they fit nice on a PCB. However the prototyping process can be painful due to the incompatibility with standard 2.5 mm pin headers. You can use a full development board like NodeMCU with all its imperfections (size, high current consumption1 compared to ESP sleep states, mismatched pin names 2, etc.) or you can take a soldering iron, wire and do all the necessary wiring as a “3D post-modern artistic piece from a copper wire”. To remind; ESP8266 requires several GPIO pins to be pulled-up or pulled-down in order to boot from flash memory or to enter a bootloder (see ESP8266 Wiki for details), so a little bit of wiring is unavoidable. In some cases you might want to attach a voltage regulator.

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