Dev board

KiCad EMS Plugin — Examples

Example KiCad boards for the Antenna Designer plugin, a pcbnew plugin with an embedded FDTD solver for simulating PCB antennas (S11, impedance, radiation patterns) without leaving the board editor.

Each folder here is one board. Open it in pcbnew, click the plugin button on the toolbar, and enjoy the simulation.

Requirements

• KiCad 9.0 or later
• The Antenna Designer plugin installed from the dist/ folder of the plugin repo (Windows .zip / Linux .tar.gz, each with an installer)

The FDTD solver ships with the plugin — nothing else to install.

Examples

All five are 2-layer FR4 boards (1.51 mm, except dual_yagi_uda/ at 1.6 mm) with the feed marked by an AntennaFeedMarker footprint on User.2.

• nrf_dev_board/ — An nRF USB dev board with an on-board 2.4 GHz antenna. 21.5 × 47.9 mm, meandered IFA, tuned for BLE at 2.45 GHz. The only example with a full component placement, so it also shows what the solver does with a densely populated board.
• patch_antenna/ — A 2.44 GHz rectangular patch over a solid ground plane, 51.8 × 56.6 mm. The simplest board here and a good first run: a textbook geometry with a clean, narrow resonance.
• lora/ — An 868 MHz (EU) LoRa antenna on a 50.5 × 50.5 mm board, using the RF_Antenna:Texas_SWRA416_868MHz_915MHz footprint from the KiCad library. Sub-GHz, so the mesh is coarser and the run is quick.
• dual_yagi_uda/ — A double-sided printed Yagi-Uda for 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, 100 × 150 mm: two side-by-side rows of 4 directors fed in phase through a quarter-wave transformer and T, with the B.Cu ground plane as reflector. A directional antenna, so the radiation pattern is the interesting part.
• log_periodic_antenna/ — A wideband log-periodic array, 205 × 160 mm. The heaviest example: many coupled elements and a 0.5–7 GHz sweep, with the radiation pattern taken at 3.4 GHz.

What's in each folder

• The .kicad_pcb board itself.
• simulation/settings.yaml — the plugin's saved dialog settings for that board (band, meshing, materials). It is picked up automatically when you open the plugin, so each example starts from settings that are known to work for its geometry.

Everything else the plugin writes (gerbers, pcb.yaml, the grid and report HTML, timestamped simulation/results/ runs) is regenerable and left out of git — run the simulation to produce it.

Licensing

Two of the examples are derived from third-party designs and carry their own LICENSE and NOTICE.md, which apply to that folder:

• log_periodic_antenna/ — CERN-OHL-S-2.0, derived from ByTechLab's RF PCB Log Periodic Antenna (0.8–6 GHz).
• lora/ — CC BY-SA 4.0; the antenna footprint comes from the KiCad footprint library.

nrf_dev_board/, patch_antenna/ and dual_yagi_uda/ ship no separate licence file.