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Showing posts from November, 2021

KiCad 3D PCB renderings with GitHub Actions

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