I created SKiDL to replace the manual tedium of drawing schematics with the advantages of modern programming languages: iteration, abstraction, hierarchy, and modularization. But one thing always stood out as a problem:

Parts.

Here's a snippet of SKiDL code to show what I mean. It instantiates a PIC10 microcontroller and …

At the recent KiCon 2019, I gave a talk about SKiDL that's a good introduction to the language and why I created it. It's about 27 minutes in length if you can stand it.

I got a lot of great feedback after my talk. Almost everybody mentioned that they want …

I've added a bit of syntactic sugar to SKiDL over the past few months:

• Series, Parallel, and Tee Network Constructors
• Bussed Part Pins
• Accessing Part Pins as Attributes

It doesn't change what SKiDL does, but does make it easier to do it.

Series, Parallel, and Tee Network Constructors

Last year …

It helps when other people use SKiDL; then I can coast by just showing what they've done. Here are two examples.

Blinkenface

Blinkenface is a version of "LED glasses" made with a cascaded string of APA102 RGB LEDs controlled through an SPI interface:

Th majority of Blinkenface is just a …

Sometimes you need a quick circuit that does one, specific thing. Other times, you want to create a general design that can be re-used in multiple instances. I'll demonstrate the evolution from a specific to a general SKiDL design using a simple set of LEDs.

Four LEDs

Here's a simple …

I've added the capability to do SPICE simulations of circuits designed with SKiDL. You can read about it in this Jupyter notebook.

It's April 1st. It's also Arduino Day. Really. That's not a joke.

In honor of such an august occasion, I'm going to show you how to describe an Arduino board using SKiDL. It's really easy; just takes two steps:

1. Find an existing Arduino board designed using KiCad and export its …

I really wanted to call this post Five Easy Pieces, but I'm not Jack Nicholson and I only had two simple SKiDL designs to show. So here they are.

LED Clock

DougE recently posted a script that will layout a clock face with 60 LEDs for the minute markers and …

I used to work during summers for a bricklayer. I learned one thing there: air conditioning is pretty good stuff. (We should do more of it.)

Some people think bricklaying would be a great job, kind of like playing Tetris all day, except with real blocks. But here's what the …

In my previous blog posts, the SKiDL circuit descriptions were flat. In this post, I'll show a bit of how to describe a circuit hierarchically.

Hierarchy is typically used when there is some subcircuit that needs to be replicated several times or which can serve as a module in several …