I have a physical board I want to reproduce in Kicad.
I have traced the schematics, now I need to do the routing. I would like it to be as close as possible to the original.
I have a fairly hi-res picture of the board. Is there a way I can superimpose it to my layout in pcbnew so that I can use it as a guide and draw tracks over it? This would be temporary until I’m done, then I would just throw it away.
Thanks :).
Maybe others will offer better solution but I think you should be able to import the picture using bitmap to component converter into user eco layer and then display that layer with say 50% opacity to blend the image.
You may have to pre process the picture to highlight the features you need so that it is high contrast enough. The converter will eventually spit out 2 color (think black and white) image.
File | Import | Import Graphics …
Import as dxf will do.
You may need to convert to DXF first.
That is non trivial if the source is a normal pixel graphic like a photo. (The suggestion by @qu1ck is a direct way.)
In any case pre-processing is required. Either way works.
Looks like @qu1ck’s suggestion worked well enough. Kicad is a bit slow with the bottom picture though, I’ll try to split in 2/3 parts.
So thanks a lot!
On a side note, I think I’ve found a small bug: in the bitmap converter, changing the threshold does not update the image preview, you need to toggle “Negative” twice to update it.
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