In a previous guide, I introduced you to making art printed circuit boards (PCB) by making some floppy disk jewelry.

This guide expands on the concept. As you've likely seen on the internet, one can make art PCBs that also have functional electrical circuits on them. This is one of the best examples of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) all coming together.

To demonstrate this next step in PCB art, I have taken the NASA logo (often called "the meatball") to make a pendant or pin.

The design starts much like the floppy design, so I suggest you familiarize yourself with the tools used via that guide.

This guide uses KiCad to generate an electrical circuit on the back of the piece. Two LED lights will shine through the board to the front.

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 It came out in February, 2023, and so other tutorials using earlier versions are likely out of date as to the steps used to make art.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.