Once again, PCBWay (https://www.PCBWay.com/?from=atomic) delivered the goods and the PCBs arrived before I finished making the video on how they were made!

I’ve started a new project and part of what we’re doing will be to try and recreate the fantastic work that’s been done by Carl Brugeja (Carl – apologies for the terrible pronunciation of your name in the video) – https://www.youtube.com/c/CarlBugeja – have a look at his videos on PCB motors.

I started looking at creating coils in KiCad and rapidly came to the conclusion that life was far too short and it was the kind of thing that should be automated.

We’ve ended up with some pretty good results. I’ve uploaded my code to GitHub – hopefully, it will help other people when it comes to writing KiCad plugins – the code is here: https://github.com/atomic14/kicad-coil-plugins

0:00 Why are we here?
0:29 Sneak preview of the PCBs doing something
0:49 What are our constraints?
1:30 Making simple round coils
2:08 Making space for a via
2:26 Getting magnetic fields aligned
3:03 How does this make a motor?
4:14 Arbitrary-shaped coils – is it possible?
4:38 First attempt
4:59 Second attempt
5:25 Third attempt – Chaikin’s line smoothing algorithm
5:53 Fourth attempt
6:27 Final working algorithm!
7:00 Getting it working with KiCad
9:45 PCBWay KiCad plugin

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