BezBlog

Documentation has always been important for the splitflap project , and a big part of that is keeping its README landing page up to date so it's easy to see what the project is about. However, if you're not an electrical engineer or experienced hobbyist, the schematics and board layout images that were previously included in the README could be a little hard to read. So I wanted to include 3d renderings of what the PCBs actually look like in real life to make it even more approachable. Example auto-generated 3d rendering KiCad has a built in 3d renderer, but it's not easily scriptable (as of the current stable version, KiCad 5). Updating photo renderings in the documentation would be too tedious and error prone to do manually - especially now that the project has 7 different PCB designs - so I wanted a way to generate these automatically whenever the designs change. I've previously described how I automated schematic rendering using UI automation - a technique w...

This is my sixth 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 One of my goals when building the split-flap display was to make sure it was easy to visualize the end product and look at the design in detail without having to download the full source or install any programs. It’s hard to get excited about a project you find online if you need to invest time and effort before you even know how it works or what it looks like. I’ve previously blogged about automatically exporting the schematics, PCB layout , and even an animated gif of the 3D model to make it easier to understand the proj...

This is my fifth 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 In addition to creating a nice animated rendering , I wanted to make sure I could consistently export the final vector design to be laser cut. There were three main challenges to this: Layout - All of the pieces that make up the 3D design need to be laid out flat so they can be cut out of a single sheet of wood. Kerf - When laser cutting, the beam burns away material, leaving a gap where cuts were made (referred to as kerf). This means that shapes will all be slightly smaller than desired if cut exactly to dimension, ...

This is my fourth 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 Early when designing the split flap 3D model using OpenSCAD I wanted to include a visualization in the project’s README so others could see what it looked like. It’s possible to capture an image manually (File→Export→Export as Image), but that’s an extra thing to remember to do after every change and it’s also not very consistent. The image that’s exported is basically a snapshot of the current preview window, so the image dimensions and camera angle would be different each time. Plus, a single static image doesn’t fully convey the 3D mo...

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...