Automagically generate beautiful Adafruit-like pinout diagrams for IoT boards ✨
Boardgen allows to generate vector images, containing pinout diagrams for any IoT module. The images are inspired by Adafruit's great, well-recognized pinouts, and look like this one:
It is a Python tool that uses simple JSON files for defining shapes, colors, pin layouts and numbers. These files are then processed and drawn onto a .SVG image.
Defining new boards is fully done in JSON and doesn't require Python programming, nor SVG knowledge.
Boardgen can be used as a library (see cli.py for an example) or with its built-in CLI program.
pip install boardgen
boardgen --help
boardgen list boards
to get a list of available boardsboardgen draw <board name>
to produce an image file in your working directory
Usage: boardgen [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...
boardgen CLI v0.1.0
Options:
--boards TEXT Custom boards directories
--shapes TEXT Custom shapes directories
--templates TEXT Custom templates directories
--presets TEXT Custom presets .json
--roles TEXT Custom roles .json
--flash TEXT Custom flash regions .json
--help Show this message and exit.
Commands:
draw Draw board diagrams
list List boards/templates/etc
Writing board definitions means putting a .JSON file to a directory and specifying this directory using the --boards
option.
Boardgen is meant to be used with PlatformIO-style board definition files. An example of such a board can be found here (libretiny/boards/wr3.json).
Note that the board manifest uses "_base"
definitions. These are merged recursively with the manifest, and this result is expected to produce a complete file.
Apart from PlatformIO default variables (such as build
, debug
, upload
or name
, url
and vendor
) the board definition contains a Pcb
object.
A Template
is a JSON object containing lists of shapes for each side of a PCB. Additionally, it contains a mapping of pin names to shape IDs to allow automatic alignment of pinout labels.
{
"name": "demo-template",
"title": "Demo template",
"width": 10,
"height": 20,
"front": [
{"info": "List of front side shapes goes here"},
{
"comment": "this is a sample rectangle",
"id": "shape1",
"type": "rect",
"pos": "0,0",
"size": "10,20",
"fill": {"color": "black"}
}
],
"back": [],
"pads": {
"1": "demo-template.front.shape1",
"2": "demo-template.front.shape2",
"3": "demo-template.front.shape3",
"4": "demo-template.front.shape4",
}
}
A shape JSON file is an array of multiple shape objects. Including shape JSON files is possible. For example, to include my-shape.json
:
{
"name": "my-shape",
"id": "id-of-my-shape",
"pos": "5,10"
}
Each shape is a JSON object, which has a common set of attributes:
pos
- REQUIRED: defines the anchor of a shape (in milimeters)preset
(or apresets
array) - used to merge the shape object with a preset object (see "boardgen list presets")id
- used to refer to the shape's anchor from thepads
mappingvars
- mapping of variables for${VAR}
substitution, optional
type
: must be"rect"
pos
: REQUIRED: rectangle top-left corner positionsize
: REQUIRED: rectangle size ("width,height") in milimetersfill
: see FillStyle belowstroke
: see FillStyle belowrx
: X corner radiusry
: Y corner radius
type
: must be"circle"
pos
: REQUIRED: circle center positiond
: diameter (milimeters), OR:r
: radius (milimeters) - one ofd
andr
is requiredfill
: see FillStyle belowstroke
: see FillStyle below
type
: must be"text"
pos
: REQUIRED: text center positionfont_size
: REQUIRED: font sizetext
: REQUIRED: string to drawfill
: see FillStyle below
color
: string (color name, HTML hex), fill/stroke colorlgrad
: linear gradient as a list ["x,y", "color", "x,y", "color"]- 1st stop position
- 1st stop color
- 2nd stop position
- 2nd stop color
width
: stroke width (not used for "fill")
As this project is just a quick solution that'll be used in LibreTiny for generating pinouts, it's not really well documented. If you find this project interesting and need any help using it, feel free to open an issue and I'll try to provide more examples and info on how to use it.