Good Day,
What is the best method of adding and amending the KiCad/kicad-symbols libraries?
I have been able to edit and amend the ‘old archived’ libraries via KiCAD 4.
When I try and load the new library in that I want to edit the description box is empty yet I can see via a text editor that there is a description. Do I need to use certain tools or scripts or compile KiCAD 5 from source?
I hope this makes sense - I sometimes have difficulties communicating.
Kicad 5 libs are incompatible with kicad 4.
(Explained in detail on the library download pages, the readme and hinted at in the repo descriptions)
This means there is no out of the box way to get it done.
But there is a way. For footprint libs there is a script that can simply delete incompatible footprints. (More details about that see my faq entry)[How can i install a specific version of the footprint library?]
I plan to write a similar script for symbols. Kicad 5 changed to a newer version of the lib file format. (That allows longer pin numbers)
I don’t know why kicad 4 can open such libs at all. And more importantly why it does not seem to be able to read the information from the dcm file.
If the lib does not contain any symbol that has a pin number with more then 4 chars, then you can simply change the file header of the lib file to use version 2.3 instead of 2.4. (The official lib should not yet have any symbol with such long pin numbers. But we can not guarantee it. This is where a script that does check for pin number length before changing the file version would come in handy.)
I plan on making a kicad 4.0.x back-port of the new lib at a later stage.
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.