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by cibomahto 415 days ago
Author here- That is a fun workflow! One of the things we've been prototyping is a web frontend powered by circuitpainter, where you can use a mouse or pen to draw freehand traces that can be rendered as 'real' KiCad traces so that DRC can work. However, since we also have the path information, it's possible to do things such as automatically place components along the paths, which would be extremely tedious to do by hand or with existing CAD tools.

CircuitPainter came out of an effort to automate the production of large numbers of very slightly different LED boards for sculptural work, where it was worth the effort to write code to generate the boards. I used KiCad as the backend specifically so that we could use our known footprints/solderpaste masks and get a DRC pass.