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.

While several folks have published methods of transferring their art to PCBs, some guides use software that is out of date or requires a high level of technical skill.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! 

Software

KiCad Version 7.x - KiCad 7 is the latest iteration of the venerable PCB design software. It came out in February, 2023, and so other tutorials using earlier versions are likely out of date as to the steps used to make art. For this tutorial, KiCad 7 is used to import art into a component footprint which is used to define the board files for the PCB manufacturer. The software is free - a donation is requested to keep development going.

Gingerbread - a web-based tool hosted on Winterbloom by Thea Flowers. Taking a specially formatted vector file SVG, Gingerbread parses the file into the footprint layers. The results can be pasted into the KiCad footprint editor to make the art into a PCB. The author notes: "This tool is extremely tailored to Winterbloom's needs. It's not perfect, it's not universal, and it probably won't work the way you think it will. Because of this, it comes with no warranty and no promise of support - again, we won't be providing any free support for this." The code is on GitHub and the GitHub repo notes other similar programs. Free to use without support.

Affinity Designer 2 - used to make SVG files that Gingerbread accepts. Similar programs are Adobe Illustrator and Inkscape, but they may not produce the precise type of file Gingerbread accepts, so substitution would be the user's choice (without support). $70 and there is a free 30 day version that has all the features needed.

To create images on a computer, there are a number of methods to do so. Generally, they involve either pixel-level editing (Windows Paint, Mac Paint, Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo, etc.) and vector-level editing (Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, Inkscape, etc., and even Microsoft PowerPoint). Vector editing uses lines and curves to make up objects in an art piece while pixel editing takes groups of individual pixels (dots). While pixel editing is more common, it is vector editing that allows for very easy changes to a design.

Typical editors of both types tend to rely on a layered design. While Windows Paint is only a one-layer editor (if you overwrite something, it is now part of the image), layers can be thought of as a stack of pictures that when added together form a complete image.

Layers work particularly well as PCBs are also made up of layers. 

What Makes a Printed Circuit Board?

The substrate, a fiberglass layer usually designated FR-4, is not changeable by the PCB design. It is similar to a canvas with the color being whatever the board house uses, typically greyish, perhaps greenish.

Copper layers are on either side of the substrate (for a two-sided board which is typical for our use) and can be milled into many shapes.

Solder mask layers are used on the PCB to insulate the copper from the surface and are handy to manipulate for art.

Finally, silk screen layers provide the last bit of customization as to printing on a layer and usually text or designs are on these layers.

Holes may be drilled through the PCB during manufacturing, if you wish, for decoration or as a way to hang your art.

The silkscreen, solder mask, and copper afford three layers for customization. Some designs even use the lack of these three layers, exposing the substrate, to be a fourth layer.  The art process will specify the shapes of the three layers to make an artistic piece. With a two-sided board, there is an opportunity to either make a one-sided piece or a two-sided piece.

Another thing you can specify is the boundary of the art piece. This is designated End Cuts, as a mill will route an outline around your board.

Mapping Art Layers to PCB Layers

This is the magic in PCB art - taking a vector drawing and converting it into a circuit board. To make this happen, this guide uses Gingerbread by Winterbloom. 

To achieve this, the image layer names are chosen to match the PCB "sandwich" shown below. On each side of the PCB, there is the silkscreen, solder mask, copper, and unchangeable substrate.

The layer names are on the left in the image and correspond to the layers shown at right.

A Very Important Note on How Layers are Specified

For the Front and Back silkscreen layers -- F.SilkS and B.SilkS -- and for the Front and Back copper layers -- F.Cu and B.Cu -- material will appear in KiCad wherever you draw a shape in the design.

For example, if you draw a Copper Circle, that is where the copper will appear in the copper layer.

If you draw a shape on a silkscreen layer, the silkscreen color will be deposited. It may be up to the board manufacturer if silkscreen can be printed on copper without a solder mask between. If you can, it might be best to specify silkscreen below areas you want to have silkscreen.

KiCad and Gingerbread treat the Front Mask F.Mask and Back Mask B.Mask as inverted! Where there are items in these layers, the solder mask will NOT be present. The preview in Gingerbread will show the mask layers as they would appear on the printed board.

Edge Cuts and Drills are special also. The Edge.Cuts layer specifies the outline of the circuit board. This could be simple, like the nearly square floppy earrings on the Overview Page. Or the design may be more complex like the weasel above. For interior edge cuts, see the FAQ below.

The Drills layer is very special also: Gingerbread walks through all of the shapes in that layer and converts only circles into corresponding non-plated, through hole drills in KiCAD. It is very easy to draw an ellipse instead of a perfect circle. Don't! Gingerbread will ignore non-round shapes in the Drills layer.

So, if your Gingerbread Drills layer does not show a hole, it is not that another layer has "covered it up" - likely the object is not circular.

Debugging Image Layer to PCB Layer FAQ

Q: I drew circles in the Drills layer but they don't show up in Gingerbread.

A: Check they are indeed circles and not ellipses - the horizontal and vertical dimensions of a circle must be exactly the same. A physical drill can technically only drill round holes (end mills are used for slots).

Q: On a Mask layer, the material is where I don't want it and not where I specified.

A: The F.Mask and B.Mask layers are special. You must draw where you DON'T want mask material.

Q: Besides outside Edge cuts, can there be interior cuts?

A: Circular drill holes are the most common. But yes, some PCB manufacturers allow for cuts within the PCB outer perimeter. Be sure your manufacturer can handle such cuts. The gear below on the Winterbloom Gingerbread page has four interior cuts.

While some PCB art tends to be a bit chunky (think 2 square inches or so), nothing says you cannot make items smaller. 

PCB manufacturers typically price design fabrication by the square inch. So I decided to make 1 inch (2.54 cm) square 5-1/4"-style floppy earrings with PCBs. They will go next to the 3-1/2"-style floppy earrings I wear frequently that are made out of plastic (above). They are also about 1" square so they should weigh roughly the same and dangle similarly.

Board manufacturers typically specify how many copies of the board you will receive in your order. Three or five is typical and you can always order more. I ordered from OSH Park, which provides a minimum of three, which will make two earrings and one pendant out of the order, which works very well.

You don't need to lay out multiple copies of your board design on a panel, that is done by the board house.

The image above is a free clipart depiction of a 5.25" floppy disk. I used this as a visual model for sketching my own design in Affinity Designer 2.

Creating the Floppy Design in Affinity Designer 2

The design of the 5.25" floppy consists of:

• An Edge.Cuts layer with a 1" x 1" rounded rectangle.
• An F.SilkS layer with a rounded rectangle in the upper left corner as the floppy front label.
• A B.SilkS layer with a rounded rectangle in the upper left as a floppy back label (as I wanted it to look like a floppy if it twisted around)
• A Drills layer with three holes: a small one in the upper right for earring wires, a large central Hub hole, and a smaller index hole to the right and below the hub hole.
• An F.Cu layer and a B.Cu layer that spans a bit beyond the silkscreen areas so as to not show a gap.
• F.Mask and B.Mask layers that have two rounded rectangles for the surface medium at the bottom of each side, a circle bigger than the hub drill hole to expose some material, and a bit bigger circle around the index hole. Remember this layer you put things where you DO NOT want the solder mask applied.

To keep it simple, I did not include any edge notches.

In Affinity Designer 2, the layers look like this:

To export the file from the native .afdesign format to an SVG file for Gingerbread, go to the File menu and click the Export option.

At the top of the dialog box of options, select SVG.

The current Gingerbread site has a picture of the export settings for a previous version of Affinity Designer. The current version is Affinity Designer 2 (or higher) and the menu changed.

The settings below map to the ones Gingerbread wants. If the Raster DPI is blank, do not set it using the dropdown. Manually type in 2540.

Once all the settings are correct, click the Export button in the lower right to save the file as an SVG file. This is the file you will drag and drop in the Gingerbread application (note: not the .afdesign file, Gingerbread only takes especially formatted SVG files).

Open Gingerbread by going to gingerbread.wntr.dev in your modern web browser. You'll see a screen like the one below.

There are three example designs you can look at to see how Gingerbread does its thing. You can also download the associated .afdesign files and look at how they were created in Affinity Designer.

Open your SVG

In your file application (Windows, for example, would be File Explorer), open up the directory containing your SVG file made with Affinity Designer 2. Drag the SVG file to the blank area below the existing examples.

If Gingerbread parses the SVG file as valid, you will have a screen similar to the one below:

You can toggle the layers on and off in the lower right. You can change the color of the solder mask and silk layers for better viewing.

Use the view to make sure all the layers are the way you want. You can separate the layers and view the back with the black buttons at the bottom of the frame.

As an example of the warning above, you can use any colors you wish in Gingerbread, but for the OSH Park normal service, the Solder Mask color is purple and the silkscreens are white. You can change to their Black PCB service "After Dark", but that only provides a Black solder mask. Other PCB fabricators, such as JCLPCB and PCBWay, may have more flexible options. Be on the lookout.

Ready to Export to KiCad

If the design is looking like you want it, you then click the "Export to Clipboard" button in the lower right part of the window. This will load the clipboard with the data the KiCad Footprint Editor expects for a new footprint (part). 

At this point, you should have used Gingerbread to load your clipboard with footprint data.

Open KiCad. As of this guide, the version is 7.x. You should get the following screen if you've opened the main KiCad application and not one of the submodules:

The key thing to know at this point is to NOT open the PCB Editor. Open the Footprint Editor.

In the central footprint window, right-click and select Paste. Or use File -> Paste.

If the Gingerbread data is still in the clipboard, it will paste your design into the Footprint Creator. If it doesn't, go back to the Gingerbread web window and press the Export to Clipboard button again and try to paste once more in KiCad. 

Saving Your Footprint in KiCad

You should then see your design. Move it so it is centered in the footprint area and click your mouse to "drop" it.

You'll rarely need to do anything else here. If there is anything you want on the PCB that is not available in the Affinity Designer -> Gingerbread -> KiCad workflow, you can do that now. Most times, you can just select File -> Save and you'll get a dialog to save the footprint.

You should look to make a new library for your design - I selected "Anne". Do this using the New Library button located on the lower left. I named this footprint "Floppy". Click Save.

Now you have your design in a footprint library, congratulations. Nearly done! Yes, it's a lot of steps, but worth it when you open that package from the board fab with your design.

With your art graphic in a KiCad library, you are ready for the process to turn it into a PCB! Yay!

If you don't already have a project, click File -> New Project. Select the name representing your design.

Go back to the main KiCad menu and click on PCB Editor (the green one).

The PCB Editor looks like the screen below:

Generally, that's it, you can save your design into a file that should end in a .kicad_pcb file extension. Making multiple copies of the design in the PCB file are not needed - you can specify how many you want with the board manufacturer.

Creating the Gerber and Drill Files

While some PCB manufacturers can take a KiCad data file directly for a design, the introduction of KiCad 7 in 2023 has some manufacturers behind on supporting the new file format. No worries, we'll export the files needed. Select File -> Fabrication Outputs -> Gerbers shown below.

Use the Plot button to generate the Gerber files. I recommend making a subdirectory under your project to put them in. After that press the Generate Drill Files button. Save the files in the same directory as the Gerber Files.

These files describe exactly what each layer should have with the drill files showing the exact place to have holes drilled.

Go to the directory with all the generated files. Zip all the files into one Zip file package. If a board house cannot use KiCad 7 files, they will definitely use the raw files, most often sent in a single Zip file.

Now the fun part! Choosing where you want to have your boards made. Adafruit does not endorse any particular manufacturers and browsing through guides that make boards, different companies are used. It is your choice. There are several companies in China, in the US, and in Europe. 

For this project, I specified OSH Park in the US. That provides closer geographic manufacturing but puts constraints on what can be manufactured. OSH Park's standard solder mask is purple and silkscreen white. Sending them to other manufacturers often provides more choices.

OSH Park only imports KiCad 6 and earlier, not KiCad 7 (as of this guide being first released). Therefore the Zip file of Gerbers and Drill files is needed.

I pressed the Browse for Files button and selected the Zip file. If everything has gone well, they will show you the design. They charge $5 for 3 boards of 1 square inch each (You cannot order just one board). That is fine, I want two for earrings and one for a pendant.

If the manufacturer finds issues that need resolving (like no drill files found), they'll tell you.

Some manufacturers will allow you to specify the solder mask color and possibly the silkscreen color at this point.

Provide your payment information, contact information, and how fast you want the boards. I paid extra for "speedy service". The company will then provide confirmation and often tracking information as the manufacturing process proceeds.

Receiving Your Boards Back from the Manufacturer

Here are the boards as received from OSH Park. Beautiful! The outside ones are on the front side, and the center one is flipped over to the back (showing the hole mirrored). 

Notice the little bits on the edges. Sometimes called mouse bites, they are the remnants of the connections between boards when the large panel was laid out.

You can use a rotary tool with proper eye/lung protection to remove the excess but there is a risk of removing too much. For these small ones, I'll use a file carefully.

The jewelry mounts were from stock at Fire Mountain Gems online, although Amazon and many, many others carry such supplies. Earring hooks and hardware are also in the US at Michaels and other craft stores. A jewelry store might be able to do such work at a higher cost. Be sure you do not have an allergy to whatever metal(s) you choose.

Besides the hooks, you'll want small split rings and head pins to put through the design to fasten the floppies to the split rings. If you use split rings only, use a bit bigger diameter and you might have to size your hole in the floppy a bit bigger. Remember to ensure the hole is round or Gingerbread will not recognize it.

Going Further

As this design is in Affinity Designer 2, you are free to change it to your heart's content. A 3.5" floppy: sure. A hard disk: of course. It's only limited by your imagination.