BezBlog

This is my third post in a series about the open source split-flap display I’ve been designing in my free time. I’ll hopefully write a bit more about the overall design process in the future, but for now wanted to start with some fairly technical posts about build automation on that project. Posts in the series: Scripting KiCad Pcbnew exports Automated KiCad, OpenSCAD rendering using Travis CI Using UI automation to export KiCad schematics OpenSCAD Rendering Tricks, Part 1: Animated GIF OpenSCAD Rendering Tricks, Part 2: Laser Cutting OpenSCAD Rendering Tricks, Part 3: Web viewer Since I’ve been designing the split-flap display as an open source project, I wanted to make sure that all of the different components were easily accessible and visible for someone new or just browsing the project. Today’s post continues the series on automatically rendering images to include in the project’s README, but this time we go beyond simple programmatic bindings to get what we want: the...

This is my second post in a series about the open source split-flap display I’ve been designing in my free time. I’ll hopefully write a bit more about the overall design process in the future, but for now wanted to start with some fairly technical posts about build automation on that project. Posts in the series: Scripting KiCad Pcbnew exports Automated KiCad, OpenSCAD rendering using Travis CI Using UI automation to export KiCad schematics OpenSCAD Rendering Tricks, Part 1: Animated GIF OpenSCAD Rendering Tricks, Part 2: Laser Cutting OpenSCAD Rendering Tricks, Part 3: Web viewer In my last post , I discussed how I scripted the export of 2d renderings of the custom PCB. In this post, I’ll cover how I hooked up that script and others to run automatically on every commit using Travis CI, with automated deployments to S3 to keep all the renderings in the README updated, like this one: I'll talk about this particular animated OpenSCAD rendering in a future blog post ...

This is my first post in a series about the  open source split-flap display  I’ve been designing in my free time. Check out a  video of the prototype . Posts in the series: Scripting KiCad Pcbnew exports Automated KiCad, OpenSCAD rendering using Travis CI Using UI automation to export KiCad schematics OpenSCAD Rendering Tricks, Part 1: Animated GIF OpenSCAD Rendering Tricks, Part 2: Laser Cutting OpenSCAD Rendering Tricks, Part 3: Web viewer For the past few months I’ve been designing an open source split-flap display in my free time — the kind of retro electromechanical display that used to be in airports and train stations before LEDs and LCDs took over and makes that distinctive “tick tick tick tick” sound as the letters and numbers flip into place. I designed the electronics in KiCad, and one of the things I wanted to do was include a nice picture of the current state of the custom PCB design in the project’s README file. Of course, I could generate a sn...