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Comment by NoiseBert69 | Hacker News Reader

Feel free to have a look at the "pcb" folder.

Sorry, but I am not installing KiCAD or cloning a repo just to look at a schematic. Since the beginning of time electronics hobbyists have been posting schematics in bitmap or pdf format. It should be in the readme.

Sorry my friend - but embedding static PDFs in Git is my opinion an anti-pattern. The KiCad (or EDA) sources should be the single source of truth, with visuals generated/exported locally when needed.

If you don't like it.. well it's a free world and every engineer has it own preferences :-)

Neglecting a schematic is an anti-pattern. And I never said it had to be PDF. Besides, of all the crap people shove in Git repos, a simple bitmap that compresses well and conveys extremely useful information has to be the least offensive.

Maybe an idea for the next project: setting up a CICD chain which auto-generates them for releases. Will take a piece of your critics with me.

That's an excellent idea!

I'd agree with you in the past, when KiCAD didn't work as nicely with git. And for a professional project, I'd still at least keep snapshots of every milestone with "compiled" output.

But for a hobby project I really don't see the need. It takes a few extra minutes to install KiCAD, clone the repo, and view the schematic at any point in time.

I already had KiCad installed, so I uninstalled it to see how long it would take. It took me 51 seconds to clone the repo and reinstall KiCad. I thought this wasn't too bad.

But the joke was on me — when I tried to open the PCB file, KiCad said: "KiCad was unable to open this file because it was created with a more recent version than the one you are running. To open it you will need to upgrade KiCad to a version dated 12/29/2024 or later."

So I now think your position is reasonable. Also I think I need to upgrade Debian.

KiCad sounds to me like a great target for a project based Nix Shell install.

Always have the right version for it "locked". It works well with most tools except those that save stuff in the .config folder as it messes up isolation.

If you find the nix language daunting, for basic stuff like nix shell setup its easy but also LLMs are good for it.

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