Part markup for assembly drawings

[gsuarez]

Hello,

Just wondering if there’s any tools for part markup for BOM. This is very useful to give to the technicians along with assembly instructions. Something like this

http://www.unisoft-cim.com/pcbview.htm

I’ve been printing it to PDF and editing in Inkscape by hand, but I was wondering if there’s a script around.

Thanks,

Georgie

[Totoxa]

Isn’t the Fab layer enough? What about the interactive HTML BOM plugin (https://github.com/openscopeproject/InteractiveHtmlBom/)

[SembazuruCDE]

Check out this plugin by @qu1ck:

openscopeproject/InteractiveHtmlBom

Quite useful, but is primarily targetted towards on-computer viewing instead of hard-copy. The output is a DHTML file that should be useable in most modern browsers. Check out the demo linked in the repository’s readme.

[gsuarez]

Hi Totoxa,

I’m using the interactive HTML BOM plugin, but I need to deliver printed assembly drawings and instructions to the technicians. I found that is easier to open the PDF assembly drawings and mark them with Inkscape. Just wondering if anyone had the same issues. I switch to KiCad at work from the commercial tools and from DesignSpark (for simple stuff) and I’m really liking it.

Thanks,

Georgie

[John_Pateman]

in addition to the excellent iBOM, there are a couple of possibilities from @twl and @pwuertz more suited to printed output, linked to in this thread.

One example (Edit as realised that previous link led to a ‘suspect link’ warning.

twlostow/assygen

Making a good assembly drawing for hand soldering out of the KiCAD PCBNew

Hi! Recently I was looking for that kind of tool as well. Joan_Sparky also pointed me at this post and in the end started writing a small python script for plotting assembly drawings. It uses the KiCad API to read the pcb file and draws pick and place maps with matplotlib. The python code for the Pick and Place Assistant is uploaded as GitHub Gist if anyone is still interested. Some plotting capabilities and optimizations are missing but it does the job for now. Feel free to pick it up for own…

[gsuarez]

Hello,

This looks pretty good. I’ve been trying to set it up in my work machine (Windows 10) and no luck getting the numpy in the Kicad Python installation. I will see if I can try it in my home machine (Linux Mint), but ultimately this is for work so I will need to find a way or find an alternative.

Thanks,

Georgie

[John_Pateman]

You might be better running it from a system installed python rather than the one bundled with Kicad. I think that the script is written in Python2.

You can install numpy with pip (or install scipy and get numpy bundled in) - if you look through the rest of the thread you might get some further hints.I would also consider setting this up in a virtual environment to keep it all clean.

I would try and run it on your Linux machine and see if you like the output before trying to get it going on your Windows box