Genli

Genli — hardware

KiCad projects for the Revali hopcopter: a quadrotor with a passive spring-loaded telescopic leg that hops along the ground instead of hovering.

Firmware, and all design documentation, live in the companion repository eli-lame/Revali. This repository is boards only.

Layout

lib/                            symbols and footprints shared by every board
  HopCopter.pretty/               our own footprints
  Genli.kicad_sym                 our own symbols
  ESP32_Footprints.pretty/        third party, MIT
  esp32_30pin_revised.kicad_sym   third party, MIT
  ESP32-DevKit-V1-DOIT.LICENSE    its licence — keep it with the files
v1-prototype/                   first board — archived, never fabricated
stage2-carrier/                 current work — README.md is the spec

One KiCad project per board, side by side. A new board is a new project, not a copy of the previous one: copying inherits the previous netlist, and v1's contains a reversed ESC1–ESC4 mapping and a power section built around a part no longer used. Footprints are worth reusing; net topology is not.

The pin map lives in Revali

docs/hardware.md is the single source of truth for every GPIO assignment, and it wins any disagreement. Do not copy the pin table into this repository — link to it. Two copies of a pin map is how a board and its firmware quietly diverge.

Other documents worth reading before changing a board:

Because the boards and the firmware are in separate repositories, record the Revali commit a board was designed against in its production/ directory when gerbers are generated. That is the only link back from a fabricated board to the pin map it assumed.

Libraries are vendored, not installed

Every custom or third-party symbol and footprint lives in lib/ and is registered per project, never globally. A globally installed library is invisible to the repository: the project opens on the machine that installed it and nowhere else. v1 had exactly this problem — its symbols were referenced by an absolute path into OneDrive/Documents/, so a clone of this repo could not resolve them.

Register in Preferences → Manage Symbol / Footprint Libraries → Project Specific Libraries, always with ${KIPRJMOD}-relative paths:

fp-lib-table and sym-lib-table in each board directory already contain these; they are committed, so a fresh clone resolves without any setup.

The nicknames are load-bearing — do not rename them. Assignments are stored as Nickname:Name across every sheet and board, so a nickname is a hard reference. HopCopter and Genli are leftovers from earlier names for this project; renaming them breaks every existing assignment for no benefit. Moving the files is safe; renaming the nickname is not.

If a nickname is also in your global table, remove the global entry — duplicates across the two tables conflict.

Known gap

v1's PCB references PCM_SparkFun-Connector:ScrewTerminal_1x02_P5.0mm, from a library installed through KiCad's Plugin and Content Manager, which is not vendored here. v1 is archived and that screw terminal is deleted in Stage 2, so this is recorded rather than fixed. Introduce no new PCM dependencies — vendor anything that is not a KiCad stock library.

Moving or renaming a project

One change at a time, opening the project between each. A KiCad project is <name>.kicad_pro, <name>.kicad_sch and <name>.kicad_pcb, and the root schematic must share the project's base name — so renaming means renaming all three consistently. Use File → Save As, which does it correctly, rather than renaming files by hand.

v1-prototype/ deliberately keeps its original Genli.* file names. The directory name carries the meaning, and renaming is the riskiest operation available for no gain on a board that will never be edited again.

What is not committed

.gitignore excludes KiCad's per-user and regenerable files: *-backups/, *.kicad_prl, fp-info-cache, *.net, autosave and lock files, and .history/ from the VS Code local-history extension.

Fabrication outputs — gerbers, drill files, BOM, pick-and-place — go in a production/ subdirectory of the board they belong to and are committed. They are the exact bytes sent to the fab, which is worth being able to reproduce.