PCB Gift Tag

I have wanted to make my own custom PCB for quite a while, and with the current prices of PCBs in 2017, there was no real excuse. But finding a simple project to start out with can be a bit tricky. I have been really impressed by some of the artistic PCB designs that people have made using PCBmodE, an open source PCB editing tool. But the software is far from user friendly. So I opted for another open source EDA (Electronic Design Automation) software called KiCad. The learning curve of KiCad is a lot less intimidating, and in recent years it has become one of the most popular EDA tools among hobbyist, and even some professionals. But yeah, I still had to design something. And I wanted to get it back from China before Christmas. I ended up designing a gift tag to put on the Christmas gifts. Most EDA software is not really focused on making nice and curvy designs. I was lucky to find a nice article, describing how to use some scripts together with KiCad, to convert vector files into something that could be imported into KiCad. It was a bit tricky and fiddly, but it ended up rather well, and I got the prints just in time for Christmas.

A crazy thing to add to this is, that I ended up paying nothing for the 10 PCBs I received. The supplier had a deal that if your design was Christmas themed, and within certain specs, you got it for free. So I am definitely going to do something similar again, next time I really want to add some electronics through :3