What's the best way to make PCB heater?

1

What’s the best way to make ‘PCB heater’ in Horizon EDA?

image
image775×671 1.95 KB

2

You can either

  • draw the heater pattern in the board directly, connecting two pads
  • draw it in a new part with small pads at the ends of the loop and place that in the board.
3

Thanks! I’m hoping someone had done it programmatically, with a script, so I can avoid drawing ~200 tiny traces by hand.

4

The last time I looked, I think the python library didn’t provide this access yet.

5

When I’ve had to make funky things like this I’ve used PostScript to generate it and psedit to convert formats.

Early versions of psedit would export gEDA/PCB format.
There may be an output of psedit that can be imported by Horizon.

6

Thanks everyone for suggestions.

I found this discussion: Tools: select connected lines, merge duplicate junctions, lines to tracks (for importing copper from DXF) by valpackett · Pull Request #639 · horizon-eda/horizon · GitHub which resulted in lines to tracks feature. Will have to see how accurate it can be.

Also, board file is in json format with track segments defined by junctions, each junction has coordinates. Presumably I could write a script to create a board file this way.

junctions": {
“1fca6b95-21c0-4485-b739-bab88d92509d”: {
“position”: [
-19000000,
24000000
]
},
“d2b3f840-0ffb-4ddd-9066-bc4b437fed60”: {
“position”: [
-19000000,
23000000
]
},

    "7d8e3a8c-a3f0-4d27-9a86-5b344d881594": {
        "from": {
            "junc": "1fca6b95-21c0-4485-b739-bab88d92509d",
            "pad": null
        },
        "layer": 0,
        "locked": false,
        "to": {
            "junc": "d2b3f840-0ffb-4ddd-9066-bc4b437fed60",
            "pad": null
        },
        "width": 0,
        "width_from_net_class": false
    },
1 Like
7

ha, happy to see (potential) other uses of the tool I’ve added :slight_smile: