⚠️ This page has moved

chip-thumbnailer is now adom-chip-thumbnailer — we put the Adom name in front of all our tools.

Install: adompkg install john/adom-chip-thumbnailer

Kept only as a pointer; no longer maintained.

chip-thumbnailer

The rendering engine behind chip-fetcher's library — it renders every thumbnail kind a chip needs: themed symbol & footprint SVGs, OCCT-direct 3D renders from six angles, and crisp vector-outline icons in five styles. No local CAD install.

chip-thumbnailer walks the chip-fetcher library and, for every part, renders the full set of thumbnails its cards, carats, and the adom-symbol/footprint studios consume — straight from the part's .kicad_sym, .kicad_mod, and STEP, through the shared service-kicad and service-step2glb services. Standalone Rust, no Node, no gallia. Below is every thumbnail type it produces, rendered for the same part (Nordic nRF54L15, 49-pin QFN).

Every thumbnail it produces

1. Symbol — 2 variants

The schematic symbol, Adom-themed onto the dark canvas. Two sources are rendered so the chip-fetcher carat can switch between them: -symbol.svg (the canonical symbol from the part's .kicad_sym) and -symbol.ds2sf.svg (a symbol generated from the datasheet-extracted pin list via ds2sf, for when you want the logical, datasheet-true grouping).

2. Footprint — 3 variants

The land pattern on a dark PCB grid, cropped tight to the part. Three sources are rendered: -footprint.svg (canonical), -footprint.authoritative.svg (the manufacturer/vendor-authoritative pattern, verbatim), and -footprint.ds2sf.svg (reconstructed from datasheet dimensions). Legacy KiCad-5 (module …) footprints render as cleanly as modern ones.

3. 3D shaded render — 4 forms

OCCT-direct shaded isometric renders of the real STEP model via service-step2glb — a true offscreen render, not a screenshot of a viewer. Four forms ship: -3d-iso.png (the full render), -3d-iso-named.png (with the part number laser-marked onto the top face), and -3d-iso-icon.png / -3d-iso-named-icon.png (tight square crops for small card/badge use).

4. 3D orientations — 6 angles

The same package rendered from every principal angle so any tool can show the side it needs — the default iso, plus x-up / x-down, y-up / y-down, and z-down. y-up reveals the marked top face; y-down shows the pad/pin underside. These power the orientation switching in the chip-fetcher 3D view and the adom-symbol chip overlay.

5. 3D vector outline — 5 styles

Crisp black-&-white (or accent) line art produced by OCCT hidden-line removal — schematic-native icons that print cleanly and stay legible at any size. Five styles cover light and dark contexts: thin and bold (dark strokes, for light/print backgrounds), blueprint (blue), teal (brand accent), and dark (white strokes, for dark UI). Each style also renders a -named variant with the part number laser-marked on the chip — so the icon you drop into a symbol carries its own label.

In total ~24 files per part: 2 symbol + 3 footprint + 4 shaded-3D + 6 orientation + (5 styles × plain/named) outline. They're written next to the source files and cached until the part changes.

How it runs

• once <MPN> — render the full set above for one chip, written alongside the source files.
• scan — render every chip carrying a .thumb-pending marker (the batch path chip-fetcher triggers).
• rerender <MPN> <sym|fp|3d|all> — re-do just one family.
• status / health / config — show what exists, probe kicad-cli + step2glb + service-step2glb, print the resolved library root.

Open source — check it out, vibe-code it, send it back

chip-thumbnailer is MIT and fully open. The complete Rust source is in this page's Files tab — browse it, or grab src/ + Cargo.toml.

1. Build it. cargo build --release drops a standalone binary (no Node, no gallia).
2. Point your install at your checkout. adompkg link john/chip-thumbnailer ./chip-thumbnailer so the chip-thumbnailer you run is your local copy.
3. Vibe-code a change. Open the folder in Claude Code and describe what you want — a new render style, a different crop, another orientation, another thumbnail kind. The symbol / footprint / 3D renderers are each one small, readable module (render_sym.rs, render_fp.rs, render_3d.rs).
4. Send it back. Open a pull request on this page (the wiki reviews and merges per-repo PRs), or start a discussion thread.

Part of the Adom EDA family

The rendering engine for chip-fetcher; produces the artwork adom-symbol, adom-footprint, and the carat switcher display. Pairs with adom-lbr and ds2sf.

Run it

chip-thumbnailer once nRF54L15          # render the full thumbnail set for one chip
chip-thumbnailer scan                   # render every chip marked .thumb-pending
chip-thumbnailer health                 # probe kicad-cli + step2glb + service-step2glb

MIT, contributions welcome.