Highway to Undercity

title: Solder Bow author: Nia description: A weareable PCB bow for Solder (Starter Project) created_at: 2024-06-04

Pre-Highway Call: Jumped the gun a lil bit and made an SVG of a bow for my PCB shape. I used blender because, hey, it works (and also I couldn’t deal with Figma on a touchpad). Used a curve to create one quadrant, flipped it across the X and Y axes, and converted it to grease pencil with a high resolution for rendering.

6/4/25 @ 6:59pm Finally finished the schematic. Took me absolutely forever to figure out how resistors work ;,(

6/4/25 @ 7:16pm Basic PCB design (without traces yet) done!

6/4/25 @ 7:29pm Aaaaaand that’s all the ratlines dealt with!

6/4/25 @ 8:12pm Welp, I thought I was done, turns out the DRC decided to chuck around 100 errors at me that I had to fix in sequence (simplify polygons is a life saver for duplicated vectors). Anyways, I SHOULD be finished now!!!

6/4/25 @ 8:18pm I was so very wrong. I think I’m just going to use my svg as a guide and trace it in KiCad myself.

6/4/25 @ 9:05pm Have had pretty much no luck with tracing, only throwing more errors. Tried figma but it ended up looking pretty bad. Will likely try again tomorrow to make the blend file work, but need to both eat dinner and sleep first, so that’s wraps for today.

6/5/25 @ 2:54pm And that should be everything finished! Ended up just polygon tracing the bow image over since svg imports were being annoying -- I kinda like the more PCB-like look of it though! Everything in the 3D viewport is looking great as well, and it's (just barely) under 100mm, so I think it's ready for submission!