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.

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