Gingerbread: automate design of decorative PCBs in KiCad #PCB @kicad_pcb @wntrblm

Gingerbread is a set of Python utilities used by Winterbloom to create decorative printed circuit boards (PCBs), such as the ones used for front panels. It initially started with a command-line driven, Python implementation but eventually involved into a fully browser-based application utilizing a native library written in Zig & C and compiled to WASM.

Gingerbread consists of three utilities:

  • convert helps convert designs created with Affinity Designer to KiCAD PCB files.
  • fancytext is used to generate beautiful text labels for KiCAD PCBs.
  • trace is a re-implementation of KiCAD’s “Image Converter” program (bitmap2component) as a Python library and command line tool to enable automation.

NOTE: This tool is extremely tailored to Winterbloom’s needs. It’s not perfect, it’s not universal, and it probably won’t work the way you think it will. Because of this, it comes with no warranty and no promise of support- again, we won’t be providing any free support for this.

That said, you’re welcome to try it out, learn from it, take code from it, and give us feedback or even contribute if you’d like. If you’d like to pay us to add a feature or support some use case, reach out.

There are several similar projects that might fit your use case better.

See Gingerbread here (picture below) and the GitHub website here.


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