windfisch/kicad-board-assembly-render

Generate rendered images to illustrate your board assembly, step by step.

KiBAR -- KiCAD Board Assembly Renderer

Yea, your PCB project is nice, but -- as always -- it's a hassle to build, especially for beginners. If those count towards your target group, they'll be in big trouble if you can't provide them with a nice and shiny graphical build guide, showing not only which parts to put where, but also in what order.

I hear you whimpering "Noooo, but rendering my board with KiCAD is painful enough, I can't be bothered screenshotting the thing a dozen times", and very right you are. But fear not, KiBAR has your back!

KiBAR takes your KiCAD PCB and a list of build steps, and converts them into nicely looking, step-by-step intermediate photo renders of the assembly procedure. Fully automatic! Isn't that great?

Dependencies

• python-opencv (Version 4 works for me)
• KiCAD 6
• kiauto 1.6.8

Note that pcbnew_do from kiauto is somewhat flaky, since it simulates clicking buttons in KiCAD. Make sure that, when opening your project, no message / warning boxes or whatsoever pop up, because they can confuse pcbnew_do.

Usage

render.py your_pcb.kicad_pcb output_directory/ outpattern width height

• output_directory needs to exist. Your resulting images and any intermediate files are stored here
• outpattern can be either "prefix%suffix", in which case your files will be called prefix01suffix and so on, or just prefix.
• width and height are somewhat related to the resulting image size. Images will be slightly smaller though, due to window borders.

Example output

TODO

FAQ

• This is so slow. -- Yes. This ain't a question though.
• Why is this so slow? -- Because kiauto is simulating mouse clicks in KiCAD and has ample timeouts for doing so. After all, I don't care because it's still faster than doing this by hand.