openscopeproject / InteractiveHtmlBom

Interactive HTML BOM generation plugin for KiCad, EasyEDA, Eagle, Fusion360 and Allegro PCB designer
MIT License
3.7k stars 474 forks source link

Add option to render Fab layers #76

Closed stiff closed 5 years ago

stiff commented 5 years ago

On boards tightly populated with small-sized components silkscreen sometimes is quite ambiguous, and with pads everywhere it's hard to see the component names. It's more convenient to use bounding boxes and references, like it's usually done in *.Fab layers.

Example from my pcb, how it looks in iBom:

ibom

And the same in B.Fab:

fab
qu1ck commented 5 years ago

Note: you can turn off silkscreen in ibom if you don't use it.

I'll keep this issue open as feature request to add fab layer option, this was requested multiple times.

stiff commented 5 years ago

Tried it and it works awesome, thanks!

The only slight inconvenience with it is that we can't easily toggle values like in Plot dialog, but probably it's asking too much :)

qu1ck commented 5 years ago

I will probably add a "Hide all text" toggle to help with decluttering. It will hide reference designators and silkscreen text too, does that work?

stiff commented 5 years ago

Not sure what's the point of hiding all text, and if I'd saw it in UI it would be very unclear to me what it does. But maybe I just misinterpreting your idea, so here is my use case. For some projects I want to have separate BOM that maps references to part numbers and assembly plan like I attached in first comment. While for simpler PCB and prototypes, it's desirable to have just values and where to put them. So approach used in Plot dialog with 2 checkboxes "plot values" and "plot references" seems very logical and would work ok here.

qu1ck commented 5 years ago

My idea was to basically drop all text rendering, that includes references and values and other text on all layers. But I see your point, having separate knobs for showing values and references seems useful. I'll file a feature request for that.