DIYLC can generate a netlist which you can import into kicad to generate a PCB from a stripboard layout (if you have the diylc source file.) But that’s the opposite of what you’re looking for.
It’s actually one of the main reasons I started learning how to make my own PCB’s - I didn’t like having to work without a netlist and ERC in DIYLC and didn’t find any other stripboard design packages that had that kind of functionality either.
I really wish there was. I’d do more stripboards if there was software that could do that. Would be really nice to draw my schematic in kicad and then be able to use the netlist to design and verify a stripboard. There are some hacks to do it in kicad…but IMHO they’re more work than just laying out a PCB and etching it myself. And then I’ve got a PCB design I could send off to have made if I wanted to.
Apologies for dredging this thread up again, but I was searching for what software was being used to generate all these fancy stripboard layouts. How are folks installing diy-layout-creator on Linux…? I just tried using snap, but am getting a weird architecture error:
$ sudo snap install diy-layout-creator --edge
error: snap "diy-layout-creator" is not available on edge for this architecture (amd64) but exists
on other architectures (s390x).
Are you all just downloading the JAR and running it directly with a JRE…?
Edit: if you are just running it with the JRE, what version are you using, as it doesnae work for me with v17…
Info: Looks like you have to use JDK/JRE v15 for it to work…
It’s a bit clunky in places, and resetting various set values when you change variant is mega annoying. Preferring it to Fritzing so far though. Now if I could figure out how to put those pin headers between the breadboard and the stripboard, but somehow have them showing on the stripboard…
Yeah, it’s got clunky aspects, and there are parts it doesn’t have and if you go to find out how to create new parts it turns out to be slightly less difficult than building a nuclear fusion reactor. But it’s the best we’ve got.
As for your project, to you and anyone else who might want to do this and might be unaware, there are some breadboards out there whose rails are not 0.1" apart. I have one. What were they thinking?
Given that the strips underneath the board are visible, I’d say it’s OK the headers are too…
I think we talked about that here before. We figured the best way was just to created in KiCad, then at the layout phase, arrange everything with linear connecting traces.
It’s a pretty lame solution, though. For instance, the strip connecting the capacitor to the header can’t be properly drawn because the LED pad is in the way.
I mean, I guess you could do this, and then at the end turn off the back copper layer and add in graphic representations of the strips:
But the LED pads now appear to be connected to those strips which they aren’t, so you’d have to turn off the pads:
which is… better than nothing, but a lot worse looking than DIYLC.
Maybe you could build a custom library of THT parts with SMT pads?
After a bit more fiddling, you can make the stripboard semi-opaque. Then by sending backwards, you can sort of see that things are in between the stripboard and breadboard.
Going off topic for a bit, but I’m not quite sure how I’m going to solder the pin headers to the stripboard, without putting the black insulating spacer material on top. Will the pins still be long enough to reach into the stripboard…? Might have to pop out to the office and have a play…
The black insulating material can be taken off afterwards. Just use your nails/chisel/screwdriver/ the force to slide them off once you’ve soldered them.
I was assuming that the longer pins need to go into the breadboard, while the shorter pins go through the stripboard. As you can’t solder things to the non-copper side of the strip board, it leaves me wondering how to solder them and still have enough pin to go into the breadboard. Unless I can push that black stuff down to make longer pins, which would solve the issue…
Two years ago I filed an issue on the DIYLC GitHub: I found that if I went to save a file, the non native file dialog would offer me my home folder and four sub-folders to save to — out of the 18 sub-folders actually in that directory. The other 14 folders just would not appear in the dialog.
Far worse, if I did save to the home folder it would tell me it had done so — and it would be lying. There was no such file in the home folder, or anywhere else. I lost an entire work session that way.
Tonight, having forgotten about that, I saved an hour or so’s worth of work to the home folder and poof, it’s gone.
The developer claimed it’s a FlatPak issue. Except I have other FlatPak apps and they exhibit no such behavior.
So, data losing bug, two years, no fix. Nope. Uninstalling before it destroys another hour of my work.
Well, I didn’t use it much. Stripboard’s not really my thing mostly, and I don’t do a lot with protoboards. I fired it up because I have one idea for a simple module that could be done on a protoboard… but maybe I’ll just spend $2 on a fabricated PCB instead.
I don’t know of any really good alternatives. You can download the DIYLC Java source from GitHub and run that; it apparently doesn’t destroy your data like the FlatPak version does. But the FlatPak package is the only one in the Linux Mint software repository, and the manual says “For most Linux distributions, the easiest way to get DIYLC installed is through Flatpak”, so a lot of users potentially could be affected by this issue which the developer seems in no hurry to fix. And running the Java source requires going into the install directory and running a shell script from there which is severely clunky.
It’s a little late, but maybe someone will stumble across this thread looking for a solution. I installed DIYLC today on a new computer running LinuxMint 22 (released July 2024) and was unable to import a file from my home folder. The problem is that the DIYLC flatpak package lacks permissions to access the full home folder. It only has permission to access the folders for pictures, downloads and documents.
You can change this with flatseal (sorry for the German screenshot):
