Hello all,
Love Kicad & shoutout all the devs.
One problem I found with Kicad is that symbols are not directly purchaseable. Idea: User should be able to add purchaseable symbols (so, PARTS) to the board, all the time, easily, to make PCBA easier.
I built a proof of concept app in Qt (PySide6) to do this. Only took two years! (Barely works, only those good at coding should take a look) Important features:
- User primarily interacts with spreadsheet, full of purchaseable parts, with MPNs. Click and drag on the spreadsheet to add a part.
1a) User may also add non-purchaseable parts, for flexibility, and they would be indicated as such(feature dne yet) - User may assign symbols, footprints, cad_models, spice_models, etc. to parts, via spreadsheet.
- User may use the DIGIKEY API to automatically download digikey parts into parts.db
3a) Other apis from Arrow, Mouser, etc, would be added. User may also create parts from scratch if desired(feature dne yet)
dne means ‘does not exist’
I may or may not continue working on it, so I’m putting it out there as is. My dream is the devs build the part-centric, spreadsheet-centric ideas into kicad 11 or the community splits it into plugins. Questions: rdrisc33@gmail.com.
Apologies, I don’t know how to put this on github. Here is a link to a google drive of a .zip of this project. Run ‘MyMain.py’ to run the app.