Arduino style reverse silkscreening

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I’m trying to deploy board artwork received by artist delivered as a bitmap but the file uses aliasing that the Bitmap2Component tool doesn’t like (it rounds off many straight edges so Rs look like As and so on)

I’m using the stable release of kicad

I’m tempted to replicate the board art on the silkscreen layer manually, a portion of it appears like the back of the arduino R3 uno (new user won’t let me add a picture, google it to see)

with the in-filled silkscreen, but I’m not sure how to do this… I can set the active layer to silkscreen and make a filled plane, but then I don’t know how to etch out subtractive cuts with lines, graphics, lines or test?

can you recommend a methos of this kind of reverse silkscreening, or direct me to alternative scripts/ tools for importing graphics to PCBnew

Many thanks

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Wayne and Lane have written a script to convert images to silkscreen modules, it might work better than the built in bitmap2component of KiCAD, you may want to try one of the more recent builds, bitmap2component should’ve been improved by now.
http://img2mod.wayneandlayne.com/

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Many thanks for this advice, I’ll give it a shot.

As an alternative, have you guys a method of manually “inverted” silkscreening where the board is white, and the text is soldermask

Much appreciated.

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Let me try, I have an idea…

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Allright, it worked, don’t know if it’ll suit your application though.
Write whatever you want to appear as text on solder mask layer or change the layer of the existing text from the silkscreen to the mask layer.
Then switch to the silkscreen layer and choose “add filled zones” tool, (the same used to create copper regions), then create a rectangle covering the area of the board you’d like to see the inverted silkscreen on.
When plotting the gerbers, check "subtract soldermask from silkscreen’, and verify the result in the gerb viewer…

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Thanks it works!!

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Would be great to have this as an option when adding text “invert silkscreen”

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Four lightyears have passed since the latest message, KiCad isn’t the same anymore, you should open a new thread.

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