Noo-D(l)eus Ex Machina - Freeform PCB design proto

element14 got the order today for 300 SMD LEDs, some attiny85 MCUs, 1206 decoupling caps, some 1206 pullup resistors, and a few thousand 0805 current limiting resistors.

I think it's 138 solder joints per board.... times 10, that'll be 1380 solder joints

The board was designed with my usual PCB fab, Hackvana, in mind, since Hackvana have specials that apply to 50mm x 50mm, 50mm x 100mm, and 100mm x100mm sizes, or sizes that fit within these dimensions Accordingly, the board fits within 50mm x 100mm.

Hackvana reviewed the gerbers and shceduled the job for manufacture this week. If I'm lucky, I'll have the board within a week, using DHL for freight.

The next step will be blinkenlights and some quick and dirty AtTiny coding.

Until the boards arrive, I think I'll refine the export module in terms of automatic footprint rotation on export, and better default silkscreen widths in the footprints..

The FidoCadJ export module in the layout editor pcb-rnd also deserves some further round trip testing,

The style check now passes without errors, so it's time to send the git diff to the lead dev for FidoCadJ, along with the new pcb-rnd exporter module.

The changes to the FidoCadJ code add the export option to the menu system, and allow the Export routine to call the new PCBRNDExporter.java code.

the pcb-rnd exporter module handles the conversion from the internal data structure to the pcb-rnd export file.

The flying spaghetti monster continues to export properly, and the circuit layer in FidoCadJ ends up on bottom silk, as planned, in pcb-rnd.

Testing has confirmed that cubic splines consisting of only two vertices now export to a pcb-rnd layout as a single line segment, keeping the exported file ore compact.

FidoCadJ users now have access to not only gerber export from pcb-rnd, but also g-code.

Thinking ahead, FidoCadJ is likely to be an ideal tool for stroked (centreline defined) font design, i.e. Hershey Family/Engraving/Milling/PCB/EggBot fonts.... but first, we need to confirm that the exported PCB is manufacturable, as intended....

The exporter now simplifies cubic splines with only two vertices by replacing them with an equivalent single line segment.

FidoCadJ includes a style guide for use with codecheck.

I just ran codecheck on my export module....

~/Source/FidoCadJ/dev_tools$ ./checkstyle.sh ../../CodeAnalysis/checkstyle/checkstyle-6.10-all.jar

Aarrgh...

Checkstyle results stored in fidocadj_check.txt
lines on fidocadj_check.txt
1080 fidocadj_check.txt

I'd better sort out those indented sections and braces....

Am still wondering about how best to implement footprint rotation...