Hello,
So I’m looking to make my designs a little faster and better looking so I’m looking for one or more repositories of kicad symbol schematics, foot prints and 3D models and the easiest way to install them and deploy them for use.
Does anybody has a guide or a good advice for that? thanks for helping.
What do you mean by that? Are you searching for third party symbols because you want a bigger lib or do you want to have a local installation of the official lib.
For symbols and 3d files just clone the kicad-library repo and for footprints use the tutorial by @bobc to setup local libs or use the footprint-downloader script.
The script has the benefit that updating your libs is done via a command line option. And you get all available repos instead of the once that where available when your kicad version was compiled.
Sadly i do not know a good source for third party libs. (Search the forum a bit you will find some.)
Be careful with all libs you add. The quality varies greatly. (Even within the official lib.)
footprints is easy.
Simply checkout the footprints to any location on your disc and add them to your global fp-lib-table (using the library wizard of pcb_new)
On the first page simply choose files on my computer.
Symbols are harder.
There you need to edit the default template project.
You need to add your lib location to the search path and your libs need to be added to the project default libs.
There was a forum post that explained adding symbol libs to the template project
3d files is easy.
If your source is on github simply use the 3d files downloader. (It sets the path variables accordingly, so you do not need to take care of that)
If you do not like the downloader: (or if you can not use it because your libs are not on github)
Simply point KISYS3DMOD to the location of your local files.
The problem is if you have multiple sources for 3d files. You then need to make sure the footprints of the second source have a different path variable in their 3d model path. (Otherwise all your libs need to be in the same location. Not possible if you want multiple git repos.)