chip-thumbnailer

The chip-icon factory. Give it a STEP file and it renders the complete family of chip icons, in real time, from one source: shaded 3D orientations, transparent icons, name-lasered variants, and a gallery of vector outline styles. CLI + a live web app.

It is the single producer of every chip icon the rest of the Adom EDA stack consumes (adom-symbol's centre overlay, library cards, wiki chip pages). The heavy OCCT work runs on service-step2glb; chip-thumbnailer stays a lean Rust client and does the alpha-keying locally.

Symbol and footprint thumbnails are not this tool's job, those belong to adom-symbol and adom-footprint. chip-thumbnailer renders the chip (its 3D body) in every icon form.

The icon family (from one STEP)

The part number, lasered onto the chip (no other EDA tool does this)

chip-thumbnailer draws the manufacturer part number onto the chip's top face in the same crisp single-stroke line-font the vector outlines use. It is not a flat label pasted over the render: the text is projected onto the top plane through the live 3D camera, so it lies flat on the chip and follows the isometric perspective. A clean engraved/laser look, not a noisy 3D extrusion. The text always faces the viewer (the rotation is chosen per up-axis, so it reads forward rather than upside-down or backwards), and an optional second line carries a variant/date marking. The same mark comes on the vector outlines too.

How the part number lands on the top surface

Most parts have leads that splay past the body, a base flange, or bevels, so the full bounding box is wider than the real top surface. chip-thumbnailer takes the top 10% slice of the height and re-bounds just that geometry to get the true top-face footprint, then insets the text 10% on every side. The mark lands on the actual top surface on SOICs (leads excluded), QFNs, and domed/flanged sensors alike. The dashboard shows this as a placement-debug tile (full bounding box in red, top-slice box in cyan):

11 outline styles

OCCT hidden-line removal gives a clean, complete isometric outline (body silhouette, top face, every lead), in 11 styles across three axes: colour (white + teal), thickness (hairline to heavy, plus dark "ink on paper"), and approach (solid / dashed / neon / x-ray / blueprint / ink-on-paper). Each comes plain and name-marked.

Name-marked outlines, built for the schematic symbol

Every outline style also comes name-marked, the chip's line-art silhouette with the manufacturer part number on it. This is exactly what a schematic symbol wants in its body: the real chip shape and the part number, instead of a featureless rectangle. adom-symbol drops one straight into the symbol body. The name uses the same top-slice placement and viewer-facing rotation as the 3D laser, so the outline and the shaded icon agree.

The mark comes two ways: the facing orientation (reads forward to the camera) and a right-angle alternate, for a long part number on a narrow chip that would otherwise spill:

Works across every package type

The same one STEP in, full-family out works on whatever the part is, an RF module with a shield can, a fine-pitch TQFP, a leadless QFN, a mechanical USB-C connector, or a tiny LGA sensor. The geometry comes straight from the manufacturer's STEP, so the icon is the real chip and the part number lands on its actual top face every time.

The web app

chip-thumbnailer serve            # run the HTTP server
chip-thumbnailer app              # open it in a Hydrogen webview tab

Drop a STEP file (or pick a library chip) and watch every icon fill into its dashed box in real time, each captioned with file name, format, pixel size, KB, and true alpha transparency. A Regenerate button re-runs the whole family; the orientations stay up top while the outline + name-laser galleries collapse.

CLI

chip-thumbnailer once <MPN>        # render the full family for one chip + manifest
chip-thumbnailer scan              # process every .thumb-pending marker in the library
chip-thumbnailer status <MPN>      # what's there, what's missing
chip-thumbnailer rerender <MPN>    # re-render (--kind 3d)
chip-thumbnailer serve | app       # the web app
chip-thumbnailer health | config   # probe deps / print paths

Every command prints OK: lines for humans and a final JSON line for AI callers; once's JSON inlines the manifest + a _hints block.

Architecture

chip-thumbnailer calls service-step2glb for the OCCT-heavy work and keeps itself dependency-light:

• POST /thumbnail -> the shaded orientation PNGs, plus the clean-font name-laser when called with ?name= (the part number drawn on the chip top).
• POST /outline -> the 11 styled vector outlines (OCCT HLR), plain + name-marked.

The transparent icons are alpha-keyed from the shaded renders in pure Rust (no Python, no extra deps). The chosen up-axis (info.json chosen_up_axis) is honoured so Y-up parts pose correctly.

Install

adom-wiki pkg install adom/adom-chip-thumbnailer
chip-thumbnailer install        # fetch SKILL.md + bash completions from the wiki

chip-thumbnailer install fetches SKILL.md fresh from wiki.adom.inc at install time (no include_str!, per the no-fallback install rule).

Build

cargo build --release            # run as target/release/adom-chip-thumbnailer

No system deps to build. At runtime it needs service-step2glb reachable (for the OCCT renders); the transparent-icon keying is self-contained.

Open source under the Adom org

chip-thumbnailer is open source (MIT) under the adom org on the Adom Wiki. The source lives in the page's repo (Files tab) and on github.com/adom-inc/chip-thumbnailer. Contribute via the wiki's PR-per-page flow, or fork and drop a breadcrumb on this page so Adom's AI can discover your fork.

License

MIT - (c) 2026 Adom Industries Inc. See LICENSE.