Visual Diff

I like the idea of doing a visual diff – particularly for circuit schematics and PCB layouts. This is quite interesting. Honestly, I have never actually thought of this before but it’s great that existing tools can be used to clearly record the diff between hardware revisions in a visual manner.

The general idea behind it is pretty simple and straight-forward:

1. Using the circuit tools, output a standardised graphical output e.g. PDF, SVG, PNG etc.
2. Use ImageMagick to convert those graphics to a standard black and white format.
3. Use ImageMagick to do some fancy processing on both graphics.
4. This will immediately highlight the differences with false colouring.

Now, it’d be great if someone wrote a git post-hook to auto-magically do this.