Adobe illustrator

These from pachyderm pedals have served me well enough. I'm less concerned about getting these exactly right aesthetically as I am overall dimensions, layout, etc. For the knobs and stuff, I just open one of the templates and copy and paste it into my project. https://www.pachydermpedals.com/tutorials/templates/

Here's one I just made for a paragon mini. The footswitch, LED, and DC jack I made, the input jacks are from that pachyderm stuff. The knobs are just the ellipse tool with line segments in them.

Screenshot 2022-12-30 at 10.18.55 PM.png
 
Another thing that I didn't do for the longest time was to change the ruler in Illustrator so that 0,0 is in the center of the artboard. It's really easy to do: just go to top left of ruler and click it then drag until it snaps to the center of the artboard, then release the mouse. When you figure out how to do that, it makes it so you can just type coordinates directly from your drill template into Illustrator. The only thing to think about is illustrator flips the Y axis so that the negatives are on the top and the positives are on the bottom. So when you're transferring coordinates just keep that in mind.
 
A cool tip is that Illustrator can open PDF files.

  1. What I often do is download the Build Doc pdf file to my computer
  2. "Open" it in Illustrator. (when you tell Illustrator to open a multi page PDF file it brings up a dialog box that allows you to specify which page(s) to open. Usually the drill template is on page 5 of PedalPCB build docs)
  3. This will open as a new doc with your build template.
  4. I lock this as a "base" layer and use it as a guide
I have a whole process use for layout, trim marks, art work layers, knob previews, etc that then get me set for preparing the art for making a laser transfer for acid etching. (I've finally worked the bugs out of that PITA process and am getting good results.

If you are interested in getting Illustrator files ready for making etching resists, I have a lot of good tips on that as well.

I also recently started using MidJourney AI to create really cool graphics.
 
Another thing that I didn't do for the longest time was to change the ruler in Illustrator so that 0,0 is in the center of the artboard. It's really easy to do: just go to top left of ruler and click it then drag until it snaps to the center of the artboard, then release the mouse. When you figure out how to do that, it makes it so you can just type coordinates directly from your drill template into Illustrator. The only thing to think about is illustrator flips the Y axis so that the negatives are on the top and the positives are on the bottom. So when you're transferring coordinates just keep that in mind.
Thank you I absolutely needed to know this!
 
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