Make placement easy: Kicad + Octave + Smt Assistant

Hi Folks,

I’ve a small batch of boards to populate. I really don’t like it because it’s a waste of time. After doing the BOM, order, then prepare papers witch values where…
But one day I found that:Smtassistant , very cool and FREE! The soft helps to locate components on pcbn and as soon as a value change it will tell you. There is a little calibration process to do in order to match picture with coordinate. It’s straightforward.

So I check the example and it’s look exactly what I need. So I tried to use my files… but it does’nt work.
I’ve to format the .pos file ouputed by pcbnew. I used Octave to do it. And now it’s ok. I’m sure a programmer can do
the trick from pcbnew (python scripting maybe?). I’d like to know how …

Hope it will help!

Ch.

Here’s Octave script:
Before processing the .pos file I delete header informations.

clear;
blank=12; %nombre de ligne à laisser sans rien
[a b c d e f g]=textread(“PM-top.pos”," %s %s %s %s %s %s %s");
guill=’"’;
virg=’,’;

filename= “file_test.PKP”;
fid=fopen(filename,“w”);

for n=1:blank
fputs(fid,[“Nothing!! \r” “\n”]);
endfor

for n=2:length(a)-1
fputs(fid,[guill char(a(n,1)) guill virg guill char(b(n,1)) guill virg guill char(c(n,1)) guill virg char(g(n,1)) virg char(f(n,1)) virg char(d(n,1)) virg char(e(n,1)) “\r” “\n”]);
endfor

fclose(fid);