Anne Barela Walks You Through Turning SVG Illustrations Into Impressive PCB Art and Jewelry

Maker Anne Barela has penned a guide to creating printed circuit boards as art, using two open source tools and an art package capable of creating scalable vector graphics (SVGs).

"Art takes many forms. For some, seeing art on printed circuit boards (PCBs) has particular appeal, bridging the design and the geekiness of circuit boards," Barela writes in the introduction to the guide, brought to our attention by Drew Fustini at OSH Park. "While several folks have published methods of transferring their art to PCBs, some guides use software that is out of date or requires a high level of technical skill. This guide uses the latest versions of popular software, so hopefully it will get you started without too much of a learning curve!"

Barela's guide is built around two main programs: KiCad, the open source electronic design automation (EDA) package; and Gingerbread, a browser-based tool for converting SVGs into footprints which can be used in a KiCad project. The third part of the puzzle is a tool for creating the SVG files themselves — the proprietary Affinity Designer 2, in Barela's case, though it should be possible to swap this out for other SVG-compatible illustration programs.

KiCad, now in its seventh major release, is a well-established piece of software; Gingerbread is a relative newcomer, and was developed by Thea Flowers for in-house use at musical electronics specialist Winterbloom. "This tool is extremely tailored to Winterbloom's needs," Flowers warns, "It's not perfect, it's not universal, and it probably won't work the way you think it will."

With that warning in mind, Barela has demonstrated how the tool can be used to create artistic PCBs for use as jewelry or decoration — with impressive results. The workflow is relatively simple: create your artwork in the illustration package and export it as an SVG compatible with Gingerbread; run the SVG through Gingerbread to convert it into a KiCad footprint; and finally import the footprint into KiCad to turn it into a PCB, adding circuit traces and component footprints if you're looking to make something functional as well as beautiful.

The full guide, including a proof-of-concept pair of 5.25-inch-floppy-disk earrings and a matching necklace, is available on the Adafruit Learn portal now.