OSHPark accepts Kicad board files directly?!?!

I'm working on a small filtering board to filter out high frequency noise from an RC servo power and signal. It's a simple 2-layer board with large traces and large (>= 0603) parts. That means it's within the capabilities of pretty much all online quick turn board fabs.

Wrapped the design last night, time to order the first set of prototype boards.

A few of my favorite quick turn board fabs are jlcpcb and OSHPark. These will be hand assembled, otherwise I'd probably use jlcpcb as they'll assemble boards and have a ton of passives in their catalog of available parts.

All of my ECAD work is done with KiCAD so you can imagine my surprise when I spotted this mention on the OSHPark site of "drag and drop your KiCAD files"?!?!

Looking at their help page it turns out OSHPark will directly accept a KiCAD .kicad_pcb file, no pre-processing necessary.

I'm not sure how long OSH has had this support, maybe its been a while and I just noticed it, but its a huge timer saver over the typical process of:

KiCAD plot gerbers (with the correct settings for the board house)
Plot drill file (again, with the correct settings)
Zip up gerbers and drill file
Upload zip file
Go through a web based matcher to match files to what they are, front copper, front silk, back copper etc.

These steps take me a handful of minutes (5-10min) but I've also done it a few dozen times in the past year. Uploading the board file directly to the osh site took only a few seconds. The upload worked seamlessly and the preview images looked exactly as expected. I even made a dozen or so minor tweaks and re-uploads as I kept spotting little things in the silk screen that I wanted to correct.

If you use KiCAD and are looking for a quick turn pcb fab I recommend checking osh out. If you aren't comfortable or familiar with the typical upload a zipped gerber file process it could save you an hour or so of effort.

Comments

UTM (qemu on OSX) only boots into uefi shell after installing Ubuntu 22.10 (solved!)

I've been meaning to try out running Linux and Windows virtual machines on my x86 MacBook Pro using qemu . I've been using Parallels for several years. Parallels is a nice application and works well but I'm always getting bugged to purchase upgrades. Parallels provides free updates on minor version upgrades only, say 13.0 to 13.1. With so many prompts to purchase upgrades it feels like Parallels could release a bit more minor versions and a bit fewer major versions. Rather than just purchase an upgrade to Parallels I figured I'd try out qemu via the UTM application . UTM wraps qemu with a helpful gui and comes as a packages Mac application. And UTM supports both x86 and M1 systems (as qemu also supports these systems). Creating an Ubuntu VM with UTM didn't go as smoothly as with VirtualBox or Parallels but it was the settings I chose that messed me up. Here are two things I ran into when installing Ubuntu on UTM. #1. Configure the qemu instance to use a 'Display...

Debugging an imprecise bus access fault on a Cortex-M3

This information may apply to other cortex series processors but is written from practical experience with the Cortex-M3. Imprecise bus access faults are ambiguous, as noted by the term "imprecise". Compared to precise bus errors, imprecise errors are much trickier to debug and especially so without a deep understanding of arm processors and assembly language. Imprecise and precise flags are found in the BusFault status register, a byte in the CFSR (Configurable Fault Status Register). BusFault status register bits The definition for imprecise and precise bits is: [2] IMPRECISERR Imprecise data bus error: 0 = no imprecise data bus error 1 = a data bus error has occurred, but the return address in the stack frame is not related to the instruction that caused the error. When the processor sets this bit to 1, it does not write a fault address to the BFAR. This is an asynchronous fault. Therefore, if it is detected when the priority of the current pr...

Graco Swing By Me - Battery to AC wall adapter modification

If you have one of these Graco battery powered swings you are probably familiar with the cost of C batteries! The swing takes four of them and they only last a handful of days. I'm not sure if the newer models support being plugged into the wall but ours didn't. If you are a little familiar with electronics and soldering, here is a rough guide on how you can modify yours to plug in! I wasn't sure how exactly to disassemble the swing side where the batteries were. I was able to open up the clamshell a bit but throughout this mod I was unable to determine how to fully separate the pieces. I suspect that there is some kind of a slip plate on the moving arm portion. The two parts of the plastic are assembled and the moving arm portion with the slip plate is slid onto the shaft. Because of the tension in that slip plate it doesn't want to back away, and because of the mechanicals that portion of the assembly doesn't appear accessible in order to free it. I was...

Chris M.

Search This Blog