Waft Front Panel - AudioMorphology/waft GitHub Wiki

Notes on the Front Panel gerbers

For the Waft front panel, I decided to try using PCBs as Front Panels. I had done this before using Aluminium base material, but I hadn't been happy with the white solder mask & black silk screen lettering.

So, this time I decided I would try ENIG plated copper for the lettering, with a Black solder mask.

The problem is that Kicad won't let you draw graphics on the copper or solder mask layers, so what I did was as follows:

  1. Using InkScape, I created the graphics for the front panel as a Black and White image. Inkscape lets you use any font you want, flow text around objects etc.

  2. I saved the Inkscape SVG file, then used GIMP to invert the colours and add a Black Background (so that it is white lettering on Black), and to save this as a high resolution Bitmap (.BMP) file.

  3. Using the Bitmap2Component utility, supplied with KiCad, I converted the BMP file into a .kicad_mod footprint file.

  4. By default, this creates a Front Silkscreen footprint image.

  5. Using Notepad++ Open the resulting .kicad_mod file, and search and replace all occurrences of F.SilkS with F.Cu

  6. Save this as waft_frontpanel_top_copper.kicad_mod

  7. Replace all occurrences of F.Cu with F.Mask

  8. Save this as waft_frontpanel_soloder_mask.kicad_mod

These two 'footprints' can then be imported into the Footprint library and placed on the Front Panel Board layout

The difficulty is in aligning the top copper and solder mask layers with the holes. This took a bit of trial and error but one I had got the Top Copper image about right, I was able to note its centre point co-ordinates, and apply these to the Solder Mask footprint, which made the two align perfectly.

So, the only Gerbers I needed to send to the fabrication plant were:

  • Top Copper
  • Front Solder Mask
  • Edge Cuts
  • NPTH Drill File

Waft Front Panel

Front Panel Detail