[HN Gopher] Making nice-looking and interactive diagrams for you... ___________________________________________________________________ Making nice-looking and interactive diagrams for your PCBs Author : phsilva Score : 158 points Date : 2022-01-10 06:41 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (blog.honzamrazek.cz) (TXT) w3m dump (blog.honzamrazek.cz) | jupake wrote: | This is a very impressive start. It has the potential to be | extremely useful. I would suggest making this into something like | codepen, but for PCBs. Then makers and professionals alike can | copy-paste unique urls around the internet of their circuits | diagrams and ideas, forum posts, etc, etc. Could have lots of | utility in education as well. | | And starting from the open source KiCAD community is just gold. | Well done. | SavantIdiot wrote: | Searching for jumpers, bridges, wire annotations or anything | really in PDF schematics is such a PITA (CTRL-F then look for the | tiny blue highlight). It would be great if MCU vendors would do | something like this for their entire eval boards' schematics. | alias_neo wrote: | Can I print it? | | I love the pighixxx diagrams because they sit on my desk while | I'm working on a board; the board atop the printed sheet and I | can make notes on it. | thot_experiment wrote: | Nice work! | | A mirror-mode for the flipside would be very useful. I often | mirror one side of a board when I'm trying to understand exactly | what's going. It makes it much easier to understand where traces | go if you don't have to perform the flip step in your mind, | especially when reverse engineering a board. | | I also agree with the other posters about the usefulness of an | exploded see-all-the-pins-at-once view. | PragmaticPulp wrote: | This is a well-executed tool. | | I hesitate to criticize, but I think it's a step backwards for | usability in the current form. Having to individually mouse over | every single pin to see what it does is the least efficient way | to find the pin I need. | | Ideally, the tool would show all of the pin short labels and then | allow me to hover over to highlight connected nets and show the | full description. | digikata wrote: | The favorite schematics I've worked with on complex embedded | parts were where the EE would do breakout pages where the | common reference pins were collected together by chip and/or by | major subsystem (interface pin blocks, power, bus, peripherals, | eth-comms, etc). | | In a diagram like this, some side index of topics where a hover | would light up multiple pins tagged with that with that topic | might be interesting. | Karliss wrote: | Isn't that what the groups at the top are? You can select for | it to highlight pins related to certain port like I2C, SPI, | Serial or certain IO pin capabilities ADC, PWM, interrupt | pins. | digikata wrote: | Yes, but once you have a group picked out, it would be nice | if a lot of the other content was hidden and the labels | were shown. To do it automatically, is an exercise in space | and visual clutter tradeoffs, I'd be as happy to see hiding | of any unrelated component, or a schematic subpage, etc. | Doing automatically is the hard part, as I know the past | the EEs were thoughtful enough to spend some time building | topic subpages by hand with maybe minor help w/ their | schematic app. | | Not meant to be a discouraging comment, as is, it is a nice | utility! | soneil wrote: | Is there a good way to find a pin when I know what I'm looking | for? | | Say I'm looking for 3v3. I can tick pins, then power, and .. | about a third of the pins on the board are highlighted. Then I | need to hover over each one to see which it is, like a 2004 dhtml | menu. | yaqwsx wrote: | Yes, you can. The layout is completely up to the author of the | diagram. So you can specify group for power and then have sub- | groups with the individual power rails. | IshKebab wrote: | Extremely neat. It does make a couple of use cases much harder | though, like finding a GPIO pin that isn't needed for I2C or | whatever. The diagram at the top is very well colour coded so I'm | not sure I agree that it's too much information at once. | | I definitely agree it breaks down when you have as many pins in | random places as the example board though. I would provide both | if you have time. | | Excellent work anyway! ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-12 23:00 UTC)