Hi,
For 40+ years I have designed and built PCBs for myself and various customers. In my old PADs system I have 750 footprints. For 20 years I did SMT assembly setup for 10Ks of jobs. I ended up with 3500 SMT packages tied to our pick and place machines.
I recently scanned through all the KiCAD footprint libs and found 13177 footprints, seems like a lot. I was curious what folks might actually have in their personal libs.
I see a need for a KiCAD tool to find footprints. If KiCAD ever moves to managing “Components” (like 1.0k 5% Res and such) they the number of library elements will grow a thousand-fold or more. Since all folks designing boards need to purchase components I can’t see how components can be ignored. For components I used Parts and Vendors then went my own path. This will be a huge task for KiCAD.
As I look for a solution model I see the web. Zillions of programmers writing code in hundreds of languages and it all works because of APIs for communications and data.
I am interested is addressing these areas. If anyone else is curious let me know. bob at kondner dot com
KiCad supports integration with an external database, and I believe this is a better method. It lets everybody use their own database back end (Especially bigger companies likely already have a database with their own preferred parts, including ordering info, etc. So this part is not “ignored”, it’s just implemented in a different way then you expect.
KiCad does have several importers (schematic, PCB, projects, or libraries only) and these are exapanding. In KiCad-Nightly I see: Altium, Eagle, Cadstar, EasyEDA, GEDA). I do not see PADS yet. Maybe you can convert your own libraries via one of those formats. Or else, if you are in to some programming, you can start on creating a converter for PADS libraries :).
As for the searching part…
KiCad does have an integrated search function. Just start typing text in either the symbol or footprint browsers. It’s functionality seems to have degraded a bit recently. I discovered this when test-driving KiCad-Nightly V8.0.0~rc2 and created a topic for this (both on this forum and on gitlab).
(It has received 8 upvotes in just 3 days, and that is quite a lot for such a short time.)
Thank you. I am on 7.0 and I am a newbie. I need to fiddle with these new found buttons! I will look up the database interface. The finder is the tool I did not see and it is a really important find so thanks again.
I don’t know what exactly have to be done to make KiCad managing ‘Components’ in your understanding. May be not a lot.
I used Protel 3 for years and I had there a separate symbols for each component. So when I moved to KiCad 4.0.7 (in 2017) I organised my work the same way. Each symbol I place at schematic (like 1k from R library) has associated with it footprint (in this case 0603) and after placing symbol at schematic I never change its footprint. In Protel I had separate symbol names for 0402 resistors (like 1k_04). But moving to KiCad I decided to not distinguish at schematic 1k 0603 from 1k 0402 and from 1k 0805. As you can’t have two symbols with the same name in one library I needed separate libraries. So I have R1 library (1=1mm length) and R2 library (2=2mm lenth) for 0402 and 0805 resistors.
In Protel I generated my BOM based only on symbol name (was unique). In KiCad I generate my BOM based on concatenated name & footprint (is unique).
What else do you need? You can add extra fields to symbols and fill them with your information and probably use it in BOM. I didn’t tried it as I have it in separate spreadsheet I use to get my BOM.
I have two areas of experience (aka Preprogrammed Neurons) I am trying to satisfy.
We did SMT assembly jobs at a rate of 10 jobs a day. So 30 jobs in our 3 day queue. BUSY! I want good assembly docs.
As an engineer doing PCB work for customers I had to keep part info (BOM) outside the schematic tools. This worked very well, fast and consistent BOMs and it programmed the assembly process.
I suggest 3 BOM formats are required. Assembly, Purchasing and machine readable as in .csv. Getting the BOM outside the schematic gives you many capabilities through it requires a lot of code. See www.kondner.com/files/BB25E.zip for BOMs of one of my jobs.
The filters in KiCAD are nice but I think a search engine is faster and friendlier. For example using filters for web sites in place of Goggle Search would not be very useful.
I am still learning to spell KiCAD. I am currently reading KiCAD schematics into my BOM tool but I want to back annotate into the schematics, at a minimum the footprint assignments.
Thanks for the info, I need to read more docs and think things through.
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