I finally did a test board using PCBmodE, which I've been meaning to try out since the excellent Saar Drimer interview by @Chris Gammell. It's not so much a tool itself, more of a conversion script to allow JSON descriptions to be converted to SVG, or to gerber. It mostly gets out of the way and allows you to draw stuff in Inkscape (or whatever your preferred vector editing suite), so it is Extremely My Shit.

I'm not going to wax on about the cool stuff that's possible with it, so run a Google image search for PCBmodE.

So my test was a pretty simple. It's called Shallow, and is a shallow dive on the features and function of PCBmodE, just to get a board into my hand.

Of course, @oshpark is the only option for manufacturing these :)

Here's their gerber viewer:

In my hands:

Pretty

Purple LEDs are extremely difficult to photograph.

The battery holder components comes from The Lady, the Boldport original ladybug PCB. It's designed to be used with one of those cheap stamped metal CR2032 holders, but I didn't have one on hand. So it was easier/faster to fashion my own out of tin snips.



More about Shallow, including a brief tutorial, is written on my site.

This was a simple board that was okay to design without a schematic, but there was no way I could do that with some of the sophisticated stuff I want to do in the future. The clear solution was to write a conversion tool to convert full Upverter PCBs to PCBmodE compatible files. More on that in a future update!

Board files are here.