Author Topic: I made an SVG vector graphics to Gerber converter  (Read 4803 times)

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Offline actuallyjasegTopic starter

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I made an SVG vector graphics to Gerber converter
« on: February 07, 2021, 04:02:28 pm »
tl;dr: Have a look at https://github.com/jaseg/gerbolyze

I'm a fan of artsy PCB design and for a while I've been working on PCB tool support for nice-looking graphics. I'm personally working with both KiCAD and Alitum, and both have pretty poor graphics support. In case of KiCAD there are tools like svg2shenzhen and svg2mod but both are fairly limited. A few years back I wrote Gerbolyze, a tool to trace bitmaps directly into gerber files to side-step the performance and Gerber spec compliance issues of KiCAD and Altium (see original post). That tool was alright, but I still was not happy.

Today I finished the second major version of Gerbolyze. Now, Gerbolyze can handle both bitmap (PNG/JPG) and SVG input: For bitmaps it has a special halftone vectorizer that stays within trace/space design rules. And SVGs get accurately converted into Gerber primitives, with almost full support for the SVG 1.1 static spec. The way it works is you give it a stack of Gerber files and it outputs an SVG template with the board's dimensions and a layer for each Gerber file. You then open that template in Inkscape and put whatever you like in it (including bitmap images!). The modified file is then pasted into the original gerber files by another call to Gerbolyze.

Here's a flow char of how you use it:



Compared to svg2shenzhen, Gerbolyze can handle much more complex designs--the only limit is the output gerber file size. Also, the SVG gets accurately converted at the vector level instead of rendering it into a bitmap and then tracing that bitmap. This means things like text or smooth lines don't look jagged.

Compared to svg2mod, Gerbolyze can also handle much more complex designs. Also, it supports almost the full SVG 1.1 spec and will render things as you see them on screen with no little surprises: e.g. patterns, dashed strokes, markers and stroke miters/end caps are fully supported.

I have attached a few examples of what it can do. The first one is a design I had produced recently. The other one showcases the SVG renderer, left is SVG input, right is Gerber output.

If you're interested, please have a look at the Github repo. Installation instructions for Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian and Archlinux are in the README. For Windows I  don't have a finished installation guide yet, but installing it through Arch on WSL should be straightforward.
 
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Offline daxliniere

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Re: I made an SVG vector graphics to Gerber converter
« Reply #1 on: August 31, 2022, 11:29:52 pm »
Thanks Jaseg. Your site appears to be down at the moment.
 

Offline actuallyjasegTopic starter

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Re: I made an SVG vector graphics to Gerber converter
« Reply #2 on: September 01, 2022, 01:13:37 pm »
Thank you for the heads-up  :) :)

I will get it back online this weekend. I accidentially unplugged the cable of the laptop hosting it, and now the thing doesn't boot for some reason  :-\
 


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