Time-lapse routing video?

Layout
1

I know, it’s not the perfect category, but I did not know which one would fit best.
So I’m working from time to time on rather complex projects and I’d love to see a time-lapse video of my routing process. I tried it before by taking a screen shot in regular intervals but you have to zoom and pan to exactly the same position every time and you simply just forget it.
So what I’m wondering is this: is it possible to start PCBNew in the background, let it zoom and pan to a defined position and print/plot the layout or take even a screenshot without disturbing my normal work?
It’s not very important, I’m just curios if anybody has an idea how to manage this.

Thanks in advance,

Enrico

2

Maybe you need a screen cast software to record a timelapse of your screen?

Something like this: http://www.free-screencast.com/?

p.s. Havent test the Software, was one of the first i found in google, @maui has a bit more experience with this topic.

3

Screencasting (recording a video of the screen or window) isn’t the problem, but as he told, zooming/panning with KiCad.

1 Like
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… and this happening in the background in a second instance of KiCAD (or something like this - maybe there is a possibility to render the contents of the .kicad_pcb file) so that I can continue to work unimpeded on my project.

5

You might want to try with python scripting. You could either:

  1. save the board under a new name (pcbnew.SaveBoard) or
  2. plot the board
    every second or so.

I don’t know how responsive the pcbnew would be under such a load. Obviously the code should run in separate thread.

In any case combining these snapshots is another problem.

6

Thanks for the input, I found

but can’t make it work right now. And I wouldn’t take a snapshot every second. If I work around 100h on a PCB even a snap every 5 minutes is way to often :wink:
In combining these snapshots I don’t see much of a problem, batch processing images is pretty easy on Linux IMHO.

7

how about setting your autosave delay low, and running a script in the background to autocommit to git? then you’ll be able to roll back to any point if needed, instead of just plots.

of course, you’ll still need to figure out the rendering, but this could be done now at your leisure.

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