Create arcs of boxes with xfig
John PeckPublished , updated
I needed to add an array of 0603 LEDs to a loudspeaker drawing (shown below). Since I've done some scripting for xfig files before, I thought I'd try that again.
You can see the tiny green LEDs distributed over the big middle driver. You can find the script here. You'll need Tcl and Tcl's cmdline package to run it. Once you've got things set up, you can see the usage with
~/p/eventual/scripts/boxarc λ tclsh boxarc.tcl -h
boxarc usage: boxarc [options]
-l value Box length (mils) <100>
-w value Box width (mils) <100>
-d value Minimum depth <50>
-r value Arc radius (mils) <1000>
-s value Start angle (degrees) <0>
-e value End angle (degrees) <90>
-n value Number of boxes <10>
-o value Output file name <none>
-- Forcibly stop option processing
-help Print this message
-? Print this message
...and you can get the LEDs shown in the above image with
tclsh boxarc.tcl -l 63 -w 31 -r 2500 -s 30 -e 150 -n 32 -d 10
...which puts 32 0.063 x 0.031 inch boxes on a 2.5 inch radius between angles 30 and 150 degrees. The depth setting of 10 puts the LEDs "on top" and visible in the image.