I have been thinking about this for some of my hobby work. I would love to import a small logo/picture into the layout. It would give a strong personal touch to each PCB.
Anyone done this before or know if this is planned in some future version?
The only way to do this currently is to draw one with lines, arcs, pins, pads, etc. You can draw the artwork on a separate board (i.e. separate file), and use File->Load Layout data to Paste Buffer to paste it onto other boards.
I once wrote a program to convert an image into an array of copper spots of varying diameters, but the results were not pretty.
Note that the old Xaw version of pcb allowed you to set a background image behind the board, to be used as a guide for laying out your board. The current version doesn't support it, but you can still download the old version.
I never saw this "feature". I must have missed it in the manual. thanks
Truth is there are "ways" to do this. I normally use toner transfer so I save my files as .ps ... then print them or convert to .pdf then print
But I could just use gimp to "insert" the logo into the .ps output of PCB
Trying to hand draw it like I draw devices would be PAINFUL
I did something similar many years ago. Somebody scanned in an image. What I got was a run-length encoded raster scan. Each run turns into a line on the PCB.
It should be a reasonable task to write some code that translates that sort of image into a library part/footprint with a bunch of lines. You might want to include a scale factor in the conversion utility.
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