hridaya423/silkreel

A KiCad board in. A release film out.
silk reel reads a .kicad_pcb and renders a film of that board, built from its real copper, parts and silkscreen.
Try it in your browser with your own board. You do not need to install anything.

Trace	Glyph
A camera films the lit board. The copper routes extend out from the hero chip. The mask and silkscreen go on, and the parts drop onto paste and reflow. Then the board powers on. The film runs 12 seconds, with sound.	silk reel sets every part of the board as type. The routes of the hero chip extend out, the plan of the board appears, and a frame closes around it. The film is an 11.2-second loop with no visible seam.

Both films above are the Glasgow rev C3 board, rendered with the commands below.

You need Node.js 22 or later, and ffmpeg and ffprobe on your PATH.

git clone https://github.com/hridaya423/silkreel
cd silkreel
npm ci
npm run reel -- fixtures/boards/glasgow.kicad_pcb --style trace --aspect 16:9 -o glasgow.mp4

The first render downloads a headless Chrome of about 90 MB. Later renders use the same copy.

Give the CLI the .kicad_pcb file of your board. silk reel reads files from KiCad 4 or later. It does not read Gerber, Eagle or Altium files.

npm run reel -- path/to/your-board.kicad_pcb --aspect 9:16 --title "Your Board" --version v1.0

A trace film takes about 30 seconds to render on an Apple M4 Pro, and the file is near 8 MB. The CLI also writes <name>.poster.png, the last frame, for a cover image. A glyph film renders in about ten seconds. --draft renders faster at a lower quality.

If your machine has no GPU, put SILK_REEL_GL=swangle in front of the command. To list every flag, run npm run reel -- --help.

The film is about one part, the hero. silk reel picks the IC with the most pads, then any other part with eight or more pads, then the connector with the most pads. Name a different part with --hero U3.

The alpha formats have a transparent background, so you can put the film over your own footage. The same board and flags always render the same film.

The browser studio plays a draft of both looks, for the sample boards and for your own board. The tab reads your board file and does not upload it. The studio records WebM, saves stills, and writes the CLI command for everything else. Its source is in packages/site.

Run the full studio on your machine to render every format from a queue:

npm run start --workspace=@silk-reel/render-api   # render API on :3102
npm run dev --workspace=@silk-reel/studio         # studio on :3101

1. ingest parses the .kicad_pcb into a board model: outline, copper on every layer, pads, vias, zones, footprints and silkscreen.
2. choreo compiles the board into a timeline. A trace film is four camera shots on a 24-beat grid. It starts as a flat drawing of the copper and turns into the built board. Then it pauses, powers on, and holds on the finished board. A glyph film picks the hero chip and sets the parts as glyphs across four acts.
3. render draws each frame. Trace uses WebGL2: a lit plate with component bodies, a perspective camera, depth of field, HDR bloom and motion blur. Glyph draws with Canvas2D.
4. render-api encodes the frames with Remotion and ffmpeg. For trace films, it adds the sound, mastered to −14 LUFS.

npx tsc --noEmit         # typecheck
npx vitest run           # tests
npx eslint packages      # lint
npm run test:production  # build the studio and smoke-test it

Every change to how a film looks goes through a full-video review. AGENTS.md has the commands and the rubric.

• Sample boards: iCEBreaker © 2019 1BitSquared, CC BY-SA 4.0. Glasgow rev C3, Glasgow Embedded, 0BSD. StickHub, the ECC83 preamp, the ColdFire dev kit and the video board are KiCad demo projects.
• Sound: CC0 recordings from Freesound, listed in CREDITS.md.
• Type: title cards use JetBrains Mono (SIL Open Font License 1.1, OFL.txt), bundled so renders match on every machine.

silk reel is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. The sample boards, the sound recordings and the fonts keep their own licenses, listed under Credits.