kicad

Printed circuit boards. A container for all projects, successor to the older eagle repo.

KiCad 10 — text formats, readable diffs, ERC and DRC running in CI through kicad-cli without a GUI. The CI container image tracks the local major version, because KiCad refuses to open files written by a newer one.

Boards

Board	Status	Description
canfuel/	design finished, fab/ generated	fuel consumption converter for a VW PQ34 car, powered from the display it feeds

The canfuel board is finished: schematic and PCB complete, ERC and DRC clean with zero unconnected items, 24 parts on 55 × 45 mm and two layers, fab/ generated and committed. ⚠ While a fabrication order is outstanding, do not edit the board files — fab/ describes the commit that was sent, and an edit makes it stop describing what is being made.

The harness is built, fitted and measured — canfuel/docs/harness.md is the procedure. The whole build path, across all three repositories, is canfuel/docs/firmware/install.md; the steps this repository owns are the board and the loom.

Prerequisites

For	What	Notes
opening and editing	KiCad 10.x	the major version matters, see below
the checks	kicad-cli	installed with KiCad, no separate download
tools/check-*.py	Python 3	no third-party packages

kicad-cli version          # must print 10.x

The major version is not a preference. KiCad refuses to open files written by a newer major version, so a mismatch is a hard failure rather than a warning. CI runs the kicad/kicad:10.0 container image and that image tracks whatever is installed locally — bump the two together, never separately.

Nothing here needs a licence, an account or a plugin. Making the board also needs no KiCad at all: fab/ is generated and committed, so a fab house can be given those files directly.

Layout

lib/                symbols and footprints shared across projects
<board>/
  *.kicad_pro       project
  *.kicad_sch       schematic
  *.kicad_pcb       board
  fab/              gerbers, BOM, CPL — committed
  docs/             design documents, datasheets, and how to build the harness

For the canfuel board specifically, canfuel/docs/ holds:

File	Contents
harness.md	making the loom and wiring it into the car — a checklist, with the crimping, the connector cavities and the fuse
pinout.md	one-page reference for all three connectors
harness-*.svg	the connector and the four nets drawn from the real pad coordinates in canfuel.kicad_pcb, so they cannot disagree with the board
assembly-orientation.svg	the figure to have open while soldering — both sides of the board, and which way round each of the five parts that can go in backwards goes
solder-check.md	after each joint — for every pad on the board, where the meter must read zero and what it must stay open to, with the gap in millimetres
implementation-plan.md	how the board was designed, every number cited to a datasheet
*.pdf	the manufacturers' datasheets, listed in NOTICE as theirs

*.kicad_prl is local state and does not belong in the repo (it is gitignored).

fab/ is committed deliberately even though it is generated: for any board that has been ordered it must be possible to find out exactly what was sent to the fab.

CI

kicad-cli sch erc and kicad-cli pcb drc. Both must pass before boards are ordered. The workflow fails if it finds no design files, so a green run always means something was actually opened and checked.

Two project-specific checks run alongside them: check-netlist.py and check-placement.py.

Related repositories

The canfuel board is one third of a project that needs all three repositories. Clone them side by side.

Building one? canfuel/docs/firmware/install.md is the whole path from three clones to a working device, in the order it has to happen. Making up the harness — the part that lives in this repository — is step 3 of seven.

Repository	What it holds	Go there for
kicad (this one)	the converter board	the schematic, the PCB, fab/, and canfuel/docs/harness.md — how to make the loom and wire it into the car
canfuel	the converter firmware	building and flashing the hex, what the LEDs mean, how the car's frames are decoded
mfd15	the display configuration	the TRI file the display runs and how to upload it

The coupling to canfuel is the pin assignment, and it is one-way: the firmware is written against the board, not the other way round. Changing it means changing the firmware in the same breath, and invalidates any fab/ already sent.

Licence

Apache License 2.0. Use it, change it, order the boards, sell them — the only obligations are to keep the copyright and licence notices and to say what you changed.

NOTICE lists what is not ours. The manufacturer datasheets under canfuel/docs/ belong to their manufacturers and are redistributed for reference only; the licence above does not cover them and does not claim to. Everything else in this repository is covered.

Questions, corrections and pull requests are welcome as issues on any of the three repositories, or by email to Lubos Housa [email protected].