So I reverse engineered some boards just to see what makes them tick and I have since satisfied my curiosity… I plan to put the boards in a consignment sale at some point, if I ever need the space.
If and when I let these go, I’m thinking it would be nice to include a thumb drive with the schematics and other info I scraped up.
What would be the best method for sharing the schematics? The original files or PDF plots? KiCAD doesn’t include any PII in the schematics or custom libraries, does it?
Schematic files are pure text and you can inspect them. The only way personal info can get in there is if you add it in text fields yourself
For people who do not have KiCad installed, a PDF, PNG or SVG of the schematic is very easy and quick to view. Also sites like github / gitlab can not render KiCad schematics or PCB’s, but they can show the standard formats, so that makes it easier to see whether a project is of any interest.
The KiCad project itself is much more useful for people who want to make any sort of modification to the project.
Git embeds PII, it needs a (valid?) E-mail address. For the rest, for web browsers it’s common to “fingerprinting” in the form of inquiring a whole load of settings, from personal preferences to monitor screen size, and all together, those form a pretty unique combination (Who ever leaves all settings of their browser set to the default, no modification at all?) If you put your name or (company) logo in the title block, that obviously an identifier. But a few years ago I started using a custom page layout, as I do not like the big “comment section” in the title block. Modifying the page layout also makes it unique. It’s also possible there are path names to personal libraries in your project.
A simple grep in one of my projects finds my first name in a bunch of locations:
paul@cezanne:~/projects/kicad/mumar_rack/hx711_isolated$ grep -in "paul" *
grep: artwork: Is a directory
grep: hx711_isolated-backups: Is a directory
hx711_isolated.kicad_pcb:20706: (property "Datasheet" "file:///home/paul/projects/kicad/mumar_rack/backplane/backplane.kicad_pro"
hx711_isolated.kicad_pcb:36500: (model "/home/paul/projects/kicad/00aa_3d/MumarRack_Bracket_Alu_20x20.step"
hx711_isolated.kicad_pro:537: "page_layout_descr_file": "/home/paul/projects/kicad/00aa_lib/simple.kicad_wks"
hx711_isolated.kicad_pro:638: "page_layout_descr_file": "/home/paul/projects/kicad/00aa_lib/simple.kicad_wks",
hx711_isolated.kicad_sch:5986: (property "Datasheet" "file:///home/paul/projects/kicad/mumar_rack/backplane/backplane.kicad_pro"
grep: library: Is a directory
sym-lib-table:4: (lib (name "rotaswitch")(type "KiCad")(uri "/home/paul/Desktop/rotaswitch.kicad_sym")(options "")(descr ""))
The backups directory may also have PII after you cleaned up the current project 