[HN Gopher] Making nice-looking and interactive diagrams for you...
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       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!
        
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       (page generated 2022-01-12 23:00 UTC)