A button in KiCad's board editor that sends the board to SolidCraft in one click, the way Eagle could push a board to Fusion. The board opens in a new SolidCraft tab looking like the real thing: solder mask, silkscreen, top and bottom traces, pads, holes and every component with a 3D model. One way only: nothing comes back to KiCad.
Works on Linux (built and tested there). macOS and Windows are untested.
The board, traces, mask and silkscreen are light display surfaces, not solid bodies, so a board stays quick to work with when it is a small part of a larger mechanical design. Only the bare board is a true solid you can measure and attach to.
On a 100-part, two-sided board with KiCad 10.0.6 and SolidCraft 0.28 on Linux: about 8 seconds from the click to the open tab.
- Saves the board, the same as pressing Save. Edits you have not saved could not be sent otherwise.
- Converts it with solidcraft-kicad, off KiCad's thread so the editor stays responsive.
- Opens it in SolidCraft as a new, read-only tab: in the window you already have open, or it starts SolidCraft. Use Save As to keep a copy. Each push opens a fresh tab, because SolidCraft cannot reload or close a tab from outside; close old ones yourself.
- Makes a drop-in copy: one light mesh file with every colour, for dropping the board into another design with Insert Mesh. It takes about 25 seconds more and inserts in under a second. (Linking the saved board design into another design brings only the bare board across, not the traces and parts, which is why this copy exists.)
Both files go in a solidcraft folder next to the board, with a log of the last push.
Progress and errors appear as desktop notifications.
- KiCad 10, with
kicad-clion the PATH. - SolidCraft 0.18.3 or later (tested with 0.28.0), with its control channel on (the default).
- solidcraft-kicad (tested with 0.4.0): the converter, by another author. This button only drives it.
- Python 3 on the PATH.
Tested on Linux (Fedora, KDE). macOS and Windows paths are in the code but untested, and the installer is for Linux only.
git clone https://github.com/Xeno-va/PushToSolidCraft.git
cd PushToSolidCraft
./install.sh
Restart the board editor. The button is the small green board with a blue arrow, the last icon at the right end of the top toolbar (marked in red in the picture above). If you also have other plugins installed, it sits among their icons in that same group.
The programs are found on the PATH, then in usual install folders (~/Applications, an
extracted SolidCraft in ~/.local/share/solidcraft-*). To point at them directly, set
SOLIDCRAFT_KICAD, SOLIDCRAFT_APP and SOLIDCRAFT_CLI.
- Inner copper layers are not shown (solidcraft-kicad leaves them out).
- solidcraft-kicad 0.4.0 stops on boards whose logo graphics have references like
G***(seen on SparkFun boards). - Parts with no 3D model in KiCad come across without a body, as they should.
MIT. solidcraft-kicad is Apache-2.0 and SolidCraft is MIT or Apache-2.0; neither is included here. This project is not affiliated with either.