Documentation Generator for KiCad 7 Projects

NOTE: holmesrichards maintains a much more polished fork of this script

• It implements several of the improvements proposed below and adds some nice multi-board-project behavior
• This version is left as-is for now as a basic example of how to use the KiCad 7 kicad-cli

What it is:

• With the introduction of the kicad-cli tool in KiCad 7 we can now easily generate many outputs from the command line
• This is a quick and dirty python script that spits out documentation according to my own personal directory structure preference
• It's for Linux operating systems
• It intended as a standalone script, you don't need to run this from within the KiCad python terminal
• I imagine it will change and improve over time, this is just a quicky first pass to jot down some ideas, a starting point

What it produces:

• Schematic PDF
• Interactive HTML BOM
• Basic CSV BOM
• Compressed gerbers and drill files
• PCB layers as PDFs
• Front and back of PCB as SVG
• STEP file of PCB
• If there is no README file for the project directory a simple README is generated

Dependencies:

• Interactive HTML BOM
  • Must be installed if you want to use it
  • make a symlink to /usr/local/bin so we can easily run it from the cli

Improvements:

• User choice for the outputs
  • Maybe you could feed it some kind of structured JSON/YAML file with your preferences or something
• Detect the PCB stackup and generate the correct layers
• I like to make decorative panels out of PCB material
  • If the project is a panel, adjust the ouputs accordingly (don't need to plot a schematic for a panel, etc)
• There is some bug with the STEP output. It fails to rename the temporary file. The script manually renames it now
• The CSV BOM just runs one of the built in KiCad 7 BOM scripts, this could surely be tweaked for a more personal touch