Making nice-looking and interactive diagrams for your PCBs | Hacker News Reader

Making nice-looking and interactive diagrams for your PCBs

blog.honzamrazek.cz

227 pointsphsilva18 comments

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.

The favorite schematics I've worked with on complex embedded parts were where the EE would do breakout pages where the common reference pins were collected together by chip and/or by major subsystem (interface pin blocks, power, bus, peripherals, eth-comms, etc).

In a diagram like this, some side index of topics where a hover would light up multiple pins tagged with that with that topic might be interesting.

Isn't that what the groups at the top are? You can select for it to highlight pins related to certain port like I2C, SPI, Serial or certain IO pin capabilities ADC, PWM, interrupt pins.

Yes, but once you have a group picked out, it would be nice if a lot of the other content was hidden and the labels were shown. To do it automatically, is an exercise in space and visual clutter tradeoffs, I'd be as happy to see hiding of any unrelated component, or a schematic subpage, etc. Doing automatically is the hard part, as I know the past the EEs were thoughtful enough to spend some time building topic subpages by hand with maybe minor help w/ their schematic app.

Not meant to be a discouraging comment, as is, it is a nice utility!

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.

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.

Yes, you can. The layout is completely up to the author of the diagram. So you can specify group for power and then have sub-groups with the individual power rails.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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

I’m considering switching to KiCAD from DIPTrace. DT isn’t anything special but it works really well for me. I don’t think I want to step up to Altium not because of cost but because I only lay out one board a year tops.

I see community support like this and it’s a strong selling point. Any advice?

Do it! I switched from Eagle years back because I needed a guarantee that I'd be able to open a decade-old design and the subscription model destroyed that confidence. Kicad was annoying but manageable then, it's an absolute joy to use now.

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