Good afternoon.
My company needs to create a PCB project for circular arrays of LEDS, that are going to be used for visual inspection applications (that is, mechanically mounted around cameras). What we need is very similar to the following kind of applications, created in Eagle:
In our case, we wolud need to create PCBs for circular arrays of white LEDS (for lighting purpose).
So far, It seems to me that I cannot find in KiCad something similar to the “Circular Layout Tool” of Eagle…I only found a “circular array” function in PcbNew, but there is no way to set the Radius of my circles, or to set precisely the angles of the LEDs; furthermore, I do not know how I could work on circular arrays both in Eeschema end in Pcbnew (it seems that just the second one can deal, in some way, with circular layouts of several components…while Eeschema cannot).
Any idea about how I could solve my problem in KiCad?
Thank you very much; I will take a look at this topic; the project seems to be very similar to mine.
The only problem is that I’m not very expert in dealing with scripts, so I am not sure to be able to modify the example project for my purpose.
If anybody else has any further hint/example for my problem, please let me know.
You might also want to look at Replicate layout plugin. It probably is not what you are looking for as you would need to put segment into hierarchical page.
Thank you very much for all the answers and all your support. I will perform some tests, and try to understand what is the best way for my needs.
I’ll let you know asap.
Just a last question: for using the Python scripts of the links you have posted, will I need the “Tools->External Plugins” menu of a nightly version of KiCad (as my stable 4.0.7 version does not offer that command), or there is another way to launch plugins? (I did not find this information in the official documentation).
Thank you in advance.
Yup you will need current nightlies for my plugin and I suspect also for mmccoo’s work.
And from current user input on this forum I’d recommend against upgrading. Not because the SW is buggy as it is not. but because there were quite a lot of changes regarding the libraries that don’t have a clear migration path.
If you can create a VM and install V5 into VM, you could open just a layout with V5 and run the python scripts. But if you have to google what VM is, I think it is better to dismiss this idea.
Thank you, MitjaN.
As I am new in KiCad, there are several things that I still ignore; following, my list of doubts:
1- For running a scritp, is there the possibility to call it directly from the Python console (instead of using the “Tools->External Plugins” button of the nightly versions), so that I can keep using the official, stable 4.07 release, or am I wrong?
2- I guess you are suggesting me to install a Virtual Machine, but I cannot precisely understand for what purpose; should I work on the same project using both the official release installed on the physical machine and also the nightly release installed on the Virtual Machine?
3- Let’s suppose I would like to use all the plugins developed by mmccoo (that seems to be the best fitting for my needs); would not be enough to adopt the same nightly release used in his video examples, for being sure that everything will work correctly? (the only difference is that I am working in Windows, while he seems working in Linux Ubuntu).