Does anybody know of any plugins that will take a programmatically defined netlist and make a schematic from it?
So you have a list of components and connections and you want some plugin or piece of code to design a schematic for you?
Query 1: have you asked chatgpt yet?
Query 2: Even if āitā exists I highly doubt that it can do a better job than yourself. It is not likely that it will yield a good looking schematic. So that raises the question: why do you want this?
Query 3: how have you generated the netlist? Usually it comes from schematics.
Bas
The confusion is partly because I moved the post from a another thread where the original question was about problems in a project that used Ergogen, a keyboard layout generator. The back link to the original topic is below the first post.
I think the main problem with generating a schematic from the netlist is that while you may have the netlist and the components, you donāt have the XY coordinates of the symbols as you would from a drawn schematic. So any processing software would have to create some kind of 2D graph. Maybe you can get a starting point for XY coordinates from the layout. Otherwise I have no .
Why do you want a schematic anyway? Itās not clear that it will help you notice the error you missed.
Ah, I missed this started in the thread mentioning Ergogen.
The question reminds me of SKiDL, but like Ergogen, this skips the schematic completely and just creates the netlist.
I quite like the Idea of SKiDL, although I have not used it myself. I donāt use it because the sort of schematics I draw are not suitable for SKiDL.
In principle, Schematics could be generated from scripts in a similar way to PCB footprint placement and routing. There are for example a bunch of forks of the āStudio Clockā created with SKiDL, and which has lots of leds in a circle and tracks drawn by a script. See for example:
(Python) scripting inside the schematic is being very slowly adopted though it has been in the PCb editor for a lot of years. It is possible to open a python console in the Schematic editor in KiCad V8, but I have never used this myself and donāt know what you can do with it.
A problem with the scripted approach is that itās quite easy to do some parts of a project, but quite difficult to do it completely. I guess it would gain more acceptance if the two methods could be combined. For example have the script generate a big keyboard matrix with lots of leds on a separate hierarchical sheet, and draw the microcontroller with itās power supply, and all the other fiddly bits manually on a separate sheet.
when talking about mechanical keyboards and ergogen exclusively, Iām working on some utilities improving design flow. One of them is basic layout file to key matrix schematic converter:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adamws/kicad-kbplacer/master/resources/example-schematic.svg
I described ergogen based flow here: adamws.github.io - Keyboard PCB design with ergogen and kbplacer
The collection of results (pcbc & schematics) can be viewed here: https://adamws.github.io/keyboard-pcbs/
I also have skidl based package for generating netlists: GitHub - adamws/kle2netlist: Keyboard's layout json to KiCad netlist - it is focused on matrix part of the keyboard but Iām experimenting (develop branch) with including common controller circuits together with an option to export template for positioning and routing of such predefined circuits (most keyboards were using atmega32u4 back when I started - with potential community support this could probably include most of todayās popular choices)
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