Description
Hey all!
Just wanted to quickly write about my impressions after trying out the plugin for the first time.
The documentation is so minimal I thought it wouldn't hurt to share experiences with others.
First of all - installation.
I'm not used to working with virtual environments with Python so instead I wanted to see if I could do the usual pip user install thing and the answer is: yes, I can.
So instead of doing the virtual environment thing I installed kiplot with:
pip3 install --user -e .
The --user flag is used to not mess up with your system python and instead install into user local.
After this, I did get errors running the pytest ( that I installed with pip3 install --user pytest ), but still later on found out that I'm able to run the program nevertheless and produce gerbers that are identical to the ones I exported straight from PCBNew.
To use the program, I used the example config-file that can be found from 'kiplot/docs/samples/' and modified it to my preferences.
To run the program, I called it directly as instructed on the docu, so:
kiplot -b
$(PCB) -c $ (KIPLOT_CFG) -v
Works neatly, awesome!
Finally one question about the config.
On the gerber export settings, there's a line to specify the setting for tented vias.
In PCBNew, the setting is 'Do not tent vias [ ]'.
With kiplot, the setting is 'tent_vias: [BOOLEAN]', so it's kind of a logical inversion of the PCBNew setting. This is the only place where I feel the kiplot setting seems to be inverted so just wanting to make sure.
So do I think correctly that:
'Do not tent vias [ ]' would be the same as 'tent_vias: true' and
'Do not tent vias [X]' would be the same as 'tent_vias: false'
Thanks for the great work on the plugin for the makers! I'm sure this will improve my workflow working with KiCad. I'm especially excited that I can export all the gerbers and drill files with a single command line command instead of the 6-10 clicks it would normally need!