Perfboard Studio v0.18.0

Added

• A part on the panel is wired to the board, not placed on it. A pot, a jack, a
  footswitch, a DC socket or a bezel LED that lives in the enclosure is taken off the board
  with Mount on the Panel, on its right-click menu on the board or on the schematic. On
  the board it becomes the row of pads its wires land in -- where its pins were when they
  stood in a row, so the copper already laid still reaches them -- and it keeps everything its
  package used to say: an LED its A and K, a pot its symbol on the sheet. One undo step takes
  it back. Such a part can also be asked for directly as wire-<n>, with -p<step> for pads
  further apart and -l<mm> for how long each wire is cut, or from Custom Part; KiCad's
  SolderWire and SolderWirePad footprints import as one, and a KiCad potentiometer
  symbol on one stays a potentiometer.

• The build guide wires it in with the long wires (phase 7): which pad goes to which lug
  of the part, named as the part names it, and over which edge of the board the wires leave.
  Every wire is on the cut list, in its net's colour and gauge, cut to the length the part
  gives or marked "cut to fit"; the bench list counts them with the hookup wire. A continuity
  check on a net that reaches the part waits until its wires are in, rather than failing
  before they are.

• Both views draw the wires leaving, and the same wires. Each runs from its pad over the
  nearest edge in its net's colour, dressed like an insulated wire on the board, with its
  tinned end showing at the pad; in 2D it fades out past the edge on its way to the panel, and
  in 3D it rises out of the pad and drops away past the edge. A row of pads pointing at its
  edge is laid in lanes side by side, rather than every wire on top of the one in front.

• Every such wire says where it goes. It carries a marker just past the edge, as a
  harness wire does -- "RV1·2", or "J1·T" once the jack's leads are named -- in both views:
  printed on the wire in 2D, on a white sleeve in 3D. The part's tooltip lists each wire with
  its pad, the lead at the other end, its net and its colour, and the guide's step says the
  same of each one: "H24 to RV1 pin 1 — GND, black wire". A part off the board no longer
  prints its pin names beside its pads, where they lay on top of its own wires, and other
  parts' names stop short of those wires.

• Two more symbols a part can declare: a potentiometer, and an LED once its leads are
  named A and K. In the part's properties, and as potentiometer and led for an agent.

• A surface-mount chip goes on the board on a DIP adapter. A SOIC, SSOP, TSSOP or MSOP
  is soldered onto a small adapter board that stands on two rows of header pins, numbered as
  the DIP of the same pin count -- so the netlist drawn for the SOIC lands on the board
  without a pin moving. Asked for as adp-soic-8, adp-tssop-20 and so on, or from
  Custom Part. The board is the size the makers sell (rows 0.3 inch apart for eight pins
  and 0.6 above, half a pitch of board round the holes), and the part is as tall as the chip
  on it or the header's tails, whichever stands higher. Both views draw the chip on its
  adapter, legs and pin-1 dot included.

• A KiCad netlist's SOIC, SSOP, TSSOP and MSOP footprints import on an adapter instead
  of being refused as surface-mount, and a part the catalog knows keeps its pin names in the
  smaller package: an LM358 in a SOIC-8 is the catalog's LM358. A footprint with an exposed
  pad, a SOT-23 or a QFN is still refused, because no DIP adapter brings it out pin for pin.

• Three more parts in the catalog: the DHT11 and DHT22 humidity and temperature
  sensors, pinned from Aosong's datasheets, and Pololu's A4988 stepper motor driver carrier.
  The carrier is drawn as what is on it in both views -- the chip, the sense resistors, the
  capacitor and the current-limit trimmer, from Pololu's own photograph -- but only for a
  part named Pololu: the StepStick boards sold as "A4988" share its pins and not its parts,
  and keep the plain block.

• Pololu's DRV8825 carrier and the Seeed XIAO ESP32C3 in the catalog, each drawn as what
  is on it: the DRV8825's chip across the lower half of its purple board, the XIAO's USB-C
  socket, shield can, buttons and antenna socket -- placed from Seeed's own board file. On
  these two, and on the A4988, the real parts stand where the names beside the pins would
  go (their makers print the names on the back), so the names are printed over the parts on
  the same dark tag the names on the board wear, and every part is where it really is.

• The build guide has the chips soldered onto their adapters first, in phase 0 while the
  bench is clear and the legs can still be reached, and then fits each adapter as the DIP it
  stands in for: a socket in phase 2 if there is one, the adapter with the other ICs at the
  end. The bench list counts the header pins and asks for a magnifier.

Changed

• The phenolic board is a quieter orange. Still the hue of the boards in the photographs
  it was measured from, at less saturation: a whole board of flat orange was the loudest thing
  in the window, and an orange film capacitor all but disappeared into it.
• update_part takes off_board, which is Mount on the Panel for an agent, on the board
  or in the design. Any other new footprint for a part already on the board is still refused.

---

Windows - PerfboardStudio_..._Setup.exe. It is unsigned, so SmartScreen will
warn on first run: More info -> Run anyway. A signed build is planned.

Linux - perfboard-studio-...-x86_64.AppImage. chmod +x and run it; it needs
glibc 2.35 or newer. If it will not start, the machine has no FUSE 2: install
libfuse2, or run the file with --appimage-extract-and-run, which unpacks it
instead of mounting it.

macOS - perfboard-studio-...-arm64.dmg, Apple silicon. Drag it to Applications,
then run this before opening it:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/PerfboardStudio.app

It is signed ad-hoc but not notarized, so Gatekeeper blocks the first launch.
On macOS 15 and later the dialog it raises defaults to Move to Trash, which
deletes the install. Clearing the flag first avoids the dialog entirely. On an
Intel Mac, install from source.

Anywhere with Python 3.12+: pip install -U perfboard-studio, then perfboard-studio.
Same release, no installer and no SmartScreen warning; Qt and VTK are most of a
400 MB download the first time.

Checking your download - SHA256SUMS carries the SHA-256 of all three
files. sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS on Linux, shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS on
macOS, Get-FileHash <file> in PowerShell. Perfboard Studio does this for you when it
fetches an update itself: Help - Check for Updates. It proves the file
arrived intact, not who built it - that second claim needs the code signing
this project has not bought yet.

This is pre-alpha software. Nobody has yet built a real board by following a
generated guide - check every measurement against the part in your hand.