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authorjaseg <git@jaseg.de>2021-02-01 23:36:00 +0100
committerjaseg <git@jaseg.de>2021-02-01 23:36:00 +0100
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+<!doctype html> <html>
+ <head>
+ <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
+ <title>Create beautiful boards with Gerbolyze</title>
+<style type="text/css">
+@font-face {
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+/*
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+ </head>
+ <body lang="en">
+ <div class="content">
+ <h1>Create beautiful boards with Gerbolyze</h1>
+ <p>
+ Today, there is an increasingly large crowd of people who do artistic circuit board designs. People who fuse
+ the roles of engineer and artist. Unitl today, circuit board design tools mostly ignore this use case and
+ present a multitude of obstacles for such use. Gerbolyze finally solves this problem and presents an
+ integrated solution for artistic PCB design that is compatible with real designer's workflows on one side
+ and with real electronic design automation software on the other side.
+ </p>
+ <figure>
+ <a href="pics/pcbway_sample_02_small.jpg"><img src="pics/pcbway_sample_02_small.jpg" alt="A printed
+ circuit board showing a surrealist manga-style drawing of a woman sitting atop several traffic
+ lights. The woman's hair looks golden from the circuit board's gold copper finish. The
+ background is blue and white with scales of gray emulated through a halftone technique like it
+ is used in newspapers."/></a>
+ <figcaption>
+ <strong>An artistic PCB design</strong>
+ <p>
+ This design was created from a digital artwork in a raster image file after circuit board
+ manufacturer PCBWay offered me some free boards. The artwork was pre-processed using a raster
+ graphics tool: It was split into layers for the different colors. Then, its color components were
+ adjusted for brightness and contrast and finally passed through a raster-based halftone filter. The
+ resulting file was then converted into circuit board manufacturing files using Gerbolyze.
+ </p>
+ </figcaption>
+ </figure>
+ <p>
+ Thirty years ago, the world of printed circuit board design was revolutionized by the introduction of
+ computer aided design tools. These tools enabled extremely complex designs through automation features
+ like autorouting and through automatic design rule checking to weed out human error. While the first
+ such tools were still very limited, their capabilites quickly grew and a few years after their
+ introduction modern electronics design without computers was already unthinkable.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Today, circuit board design programs can look back on a rich history and have accumulated a healty
+ amount of expert knowledge in their design. Despite their difficult economic niche, even <em>free
+ software</em> design tools have grown to become usable for advanced designs. However, all modern
+ circuit board design tools are severely lacking in one area: That of <em>artistic</em> design. Many
+ design assumptions are hard-wired deep into their design: Traces should be at 45° angles. Silkscreen is
+ one opaque color. etc. These design assumptions lead to these tools being <em>in the way</em> more often
+ than not for the increasing crowd of designers who try to create art with them.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Gerbolyze solves this problem. Gerbolyze interfaces with circuit board design tools such as Altium or Kicad
+ on one side through standard Gerber files. It interfaces with vector graphics editors such as inkscape on
+ the other side through Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) files. By fusing both, it yields a powerful
+ environment for artistic circuit board design.
+ </p>
+ <h2>Gerbolyze Algorithm Overview</h2>
+ <p>
+ Gerbolyze has two major components. The first is the gerbolyze executable itself, which orchestrates the
+ process of fusing SVG and Gerber files. The second is svg-flatten, a tool encapsulating all of the
+ heavy-duty computer graphics code. The gerbolyze executable is a python script for readability, while the
+ geometry backend is a C++ binary for performance.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ In the beginning of the fusing process, the orchestrator figures out what semantic layers such as silkscreen
+ or copper the tool's input files correspond to. The assigned layers are then processed one by one. For each
+ layer, the tool first checks the input SVG file for any content. If there is none on this layer, the layer
+ file is directly copied to the output. If ther is some, this SVG content is passed through the geometry
+ backend to convert it to Gerber code. The resulting Gerber code is then read and added on top of the input
+ file's gerber code. The result is written to the output.
+ </p>
+ <h2>The Computer Geometry of Scaleable Vector Graphics</h2>
+ <p>
+ The heavy lifting during this process is done by the geometry backend. While its job seems simple at first,
+ it is surprisingly stretching the state of the art in both academic research and technical implementations
+ of computer graphics. In its core the problem is that while SVG and Gerber are both essentially vector
+ graphics formats, both have very different conceptions of their drawing models: They differ significantly in
+ what happens when one of the input file's vectors is drawn.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ SVG is little more than a highly standardized description of the basic operations provided by the modern 2D
+ graphics interfaces such as Qt, Cairo or Skia that are built-in to all operating systems. Drawing
+ <em>paths</em> that are described by the vector coördinates of points along them is the most basic of these
+ operations. SVG also includes support for a surprising number of decidedly <em>raster</em> operations such
+ as masking but, operating on grayscales, these are less relevant for the type of design one would create
+ when targeting circuit board production processes.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Similar to SVG, the Gerber file format also targets a type of graphics programming interface. Only instead
+ of that of operating systems 2D graphics APIs of the 90ies and 2000s, the Gerber format was created as a way
+ to encapsulate commands for photoplotters, computer-controlled machines that physically move a light source
+ across a photo-sensitive material. Gerber's concept of "aptertures" goes back to mechanical photoplotters
+ having magazines of stencils of different shapes and sizes that could be swapped into the path of light
+ during the plotting process.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Like SVG has its paths, the Gerber format has polygons. Polygons were added to the format to ease the
+ description of irregularly-shaped areas: Previously, these would have to be drawn by overlaying thousands of
+ thin lines, described one by one in the Gerber file. Using a Polygon, one only needs to describe the shape's
+ outline as a series of points and the photoplotter will fill in the rest.
+ </p>
+ <h2>Transforming Vectors into Vectors</h2>
+ <p>
+ The crux in converting from SVG to Gerber lies here, in the conversion of paths. While in both a path or
+ polygon is described by its outline, which is described by points, there are significant differences in the
+ limitations both place on these outlines. In SVG an outline can consist of several types of segments:
+ besides basic straight lines, multiple types of parametrized curves including cubic bezier curves are
+ possible. An SVG path's outline can self-intersect (cross over itself). The path can also have holes,
+ additional parts that are inside the outline.
+ </p>
+ <p>
+ Gerber, on the other hand, has a much more limited view of what a polygon is. In gerber, a polygon is
+ something bounded by straight line segments, that cannot touch except under very particular circumstances,
+ and holes are simply not supported. Converting from SVG's flexible model of a path to Gerber's very
+ limited model of a polygon while preserving the fidelity of the input data is the true challenge here. As an
+ aside, a fun complication one will encounter when embarking on this endeavour is that most programs that
+ display Gerber files use modern graphics libraries in the backend. In these programs, a valid SVG path
+ ineptly converted into an illegal gerber polygon may still end up looking alright since these programs
+ usually just pass through the gerber's input data to the underlying graphics layer without validation—and
+ that graphics layer is the one from SVG.
+ </p>
+ <h2>Styles and Strokes</h2>
+ <p>
+ </p>
+ <!-- stroking -->
+ <h2>Gerbolyze Image Vectorization</h2>
+ <figure>
+ <a href="pics/vec-comparison-poisson.png"><img src="pics/vec-comparison-poisson.png"/></a>
+ <figcaption>
+ <strong>Poisson-Disc Sampling</strong>
+<!-- ... -->
+ </figcaption>
+ </figure>
+ </div>
+ </body>
+</html>