Imported from GitHub: AlpenglowIndustries/Alpenglow_FUterus_PCB · commit 7f5ab81 · license MIT

Description

A soldering kit that's a buff uterus telling you to FUCK OFF!

README

Alpenglow_FUterus_PCB

This is how I feel about legislating women's bodies.

Thanks to Claire Danielle Cassidy for giving me the urge to make a board, while helping her make a board! I did the uterus artwork a while back and then the design languished for several years. I picked it back up and made it into a through-hole soldering kit. The idea is to use 3x 5mm candle-flicker red LEDs on the back, the uterus is bare FR-4 on both sides, so it will light up red. Powered by a coin cell and uses one resistor to mildly limit current through all 3 LEDs. Excellent write-up here by EMSL about resistors vs no resistors on coin-cell-powered LED throwies/badges. https://www.evilmadscientist.com/2009/some-thoughts-on-throwies/

I was going to route this board normally, but then thought about how cool Chipperdoodles' boards are, all hand-drawn traces. Why not fuck around with this? And why not just scribble the fuckers? Madness ensued. Me and Architeuthis Flux figured out that if the squiggles were polygons, I could easily add a net to them without needing any schematic symbol. I used ProCreate on my iPad to draw the circuit over a screenshot of the layout, and unfortunately it only exports as raster graphics, jpeg or png. I could use KiCad's built-in Image Converter to import them to a footprint. Then moved them to a User layer. Place them in the PCB which automatically makes them a "footprint" there is no avoiding this even if you copy/paste the polygon from footprint editor it will still place in the PCB editor as a footprint, plot the user layer as an svg, then re-import the svg as a graphic. Voila! 100% KiCad chain of raster to svg to polygon. There was a little bit of scaling to figure out, but I could import all the squiggly traces as one graphic (a bunch of polygons automatically grouped), place them over the pads on the PCB, and all traces were automatically assigned the right nets. It was wild, I can't believe PCB software has come this far. Now that they were all assigned nets, I could actually run a DRC on the board. I recommend turning some things to "ignore" under "Violation Severity" in Design Rule settings: footprint has no courtyard defined, silkscreen clipped by soldermask, silkscreen clipped by board edge, footprint doesn't match copy in library (in case you decide to keep silk-only art as footprints since you don't need to attach a net to it, and then need to re-size it). DRC will take a while. Save first in case it crashes.

I had a weird error pop up when using Fabrication Toolkit to export a Gerber package for JLC - Footprint.Duplicate() missing 1 required positional argument: 'addToParentGroup'. It was an issue with the actual normal component footprints, not any of the silk art that I had set to DNP and Exclude from BOM. I couldn't figure out what the issue was, and since this was just a PCB fab job without an assembly component, I just set all footprints to DNP. Not sure if this is a KiCad 10 issue, I just upgraded and 10 is only a few days old, so there are probably some kinks to work out.

Note that in this design, all traces are unmasked for decorative purposes. This means it's hella easy to short this board out. Coin cells are pretty cool with that, but just an FYI especially for beginning solderers, be careful about accidentally bridging traces/pad at the top LED pads. Short and long legs of the LEDs and +/- are noted on the board.

This started off as this surface mount design: