I am currently using a nightly of Version 5rc2. While using Eeschema, I noticed that the “Edit Symbol Fields” window looked a lot like a BOM when a field is added that represents a Part Number. This window even has nice filters to sort and show/hide and organize the data.
And, the really neat part is that, on Windoze, I was able to mouse highlight the fields and data, and then paste into MS Excel. BAM! Instant BOM generation; no plugins of any kind required.
Now, the downside, if this window is open, Eeschema is unavailable until this window is closed.
CvPcb was designed from the beginning as stand-alone along with Eeschema and PcbNew; items in it can be manipulated while still being able to manipulate Eeschema. What I propose to discuss is to revive CvPcb as a new stand-alone that has the same connections that Eeschema and PcbNew already share. If one selects and highlights a part in Pcbnew, that part gets high-lighted in Eeschema, and it would also get high-lighted in CvPcb.
The new CvPcb could have 3 different “views”. Or, maybe just a little more fancy way like Edit Symbol Fields currently works.
It just seems to me that these tools could be combined to reduce the redundancy they already share.
This is my first chance to wrap my mind around the idea; some of it may be silly. Yet, I’m curious what other V5rc2 users think.
I also like CvPcb.
It is a nice tool to use whenever you you want to edit footprints of a lot of components.
For example when changing an old THT design to SMD components.
I have also had a design where I wanted to make some modificatitons to an 0805 footprint. Making the footprint was easy, and with CvPcb it was easy to change all the other footprints to that custom one.
Extending it to a general metadata viewer / editor would also be a very small change with usefull benefits.
Because you have an overview of all components in CvPcb it can also be used as a verification tool.
It could also be used to check the library part, against the board edited part; to check for changes put onto the board that are different from the actual library part.
It is annoying that opening any dialog in kicad does freeze the whole system. I assume this is done for a reason.
My guess is that it ensures that the internal data structures can not be changed from more than one place at the same time.
Another reason could be that this is a limitation of wx on some operating systems. Maybe it is not possible to get the focus back onto one of these sub windows once they loose it. (At least in gnome like window managers this is not a problem as crtl+alt+arrow down will bring up all windows and sub windows allowing the user to bring even such a window back in focus.)
Ask over at the mailing list or the bugtracker why this limitation has been added.
What is really annoying is if you accidentally minimize that window causing the freeze and can’t get back to it. On my Debian/KDE system the sub windows don’t show in the tool bar so that you can un-minimize them.