kicad-kbplacer

KiCad plugin for mechanical keyboard design. It features automatic key placement based on popular layout description from keyboard-layout-editor

Motivation

All PCB's for mechanical keyboards shares common properties which creates great opportunity for scripting. Although this project does not aim to provide complete automatic PCB generation tool it speeds up development process by reducing tidiuos element placement task.

Features

• Automatic keys and diodes placement
• Support for different annotation schemes
• Basic track routing
• Key rotation support
• User selectable diode position in relation to key position

Installation

• Clone this repository
• Copy keyautoplace.py (or create symbolic link) to one of the KiCad's plugin search locations. For details see kicad documentation
• Open KiCad's Pcbnew, run Tools->External Plugins...->Refresh Plugins. KeyAutoPlace plugin should appear in plugin list.

How to use?

Direct usage

• Create new PCB and load netlist

• Obtain kle-serial compatible layout json file (note: this is not json which can be downloaded directly from keyboard-layout-editor website. Expected json format can be seen in examples directory.

  For conversion you can use https://adamws.github.io/kle-serial or keyboard-tools.xyz/kle-converter

• Run KeyAutoPlace plugin

• Select desired json file and click OK.

As a service

This plugin is part of my another project. See keyboard-tools

Troubleshooting

• See stacktrace
• See created keyautoplace.log file (in PCB directory)

Known bugs and limitations

• Tested only with SOD-323F diodes. Predefined diode location might not be suitable for larger footprints and custom location is not supported without code modification
• Tested only with KiCad version 5.1.5