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Allow use of kicad-cli for KiKit present

Open vroland opened this issue 8 months ago • 2 comments

The native kicad-cli now offers a way to render board images from the CLI . Since some users (including me) had some dependency issues with PcbDraw, this PR adds the option to use kicad-cli for board images by adding a --renderer switch to kikit present.

Kicad-cli is not perfect unfortunately, as there is no way currently to output appropriately sized images directly. As a workaround, this uses image magick to crop the images generated by KiCad.

Let me know if you're willing to upstream this and if there are any changes to make.

vroland avatar Apr 28 '25 20:04 vroland

Hi! I have plans to revisit PCBDraw and actually use the rendering facilities in Kicad-cli. However, lately, I have struggled to find enough time to make larger changes to my tools. Overall, I would prefer fixing PcbDraw. However, given the circumstances, I think your solution is appropriate and I will be happy to merge the PR.

I see two minor problems we need to resolve in your PR:

  • In my other projects, I run into the issue that locating the kicad-cli binary might be challenging (especially on Windows). I usually end up with a function that tries a bunch of heuristics. But maybe there is a better way?
  • I would prefer not to depend on ImageMagick. I think that we do all the transformation you need with Python-native libraries that will install automatically with KiKit.

yaqwsx avatar May 01 '25 09:05 yaqwsx

I also had issues installing pcbdraw with the latest version of kikit, due to the pcbnewtransition package, that is when I found @vroland fork implementing a new render engine. My OS is Windows and while the kicad-cli executable was found no problem, even with ImageMagick installed the code found a convert utility under Windows for converting FAT to NTFS volumes definitely not the convert needed.

putyn avatar Aug 09 '25 08:08 putyn