For a more streamlined assembly process (pick and place by hand, lots of parts) I’m trying to find a way to highlight or step through identical parts in pcbnew.
Searching for values using find (CTRL + F) isn’t suited for this task since the zoom-in behavior prevents you from recognizing a part’s location quickly.
Can I use the python scripting interface to highlight all footprints using a given list of refs? I found this documentation here, but it’s basically empty http://kicad-python.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
By playing around with the KiCad API in ipython I managed to extract all the information I needed for plotting pick and place maps. This helped me a lot when assembling my boards, especially the more complex ones.
I uploaded my ready-to-use python script Pick and Place Assistant at GitHub if anyone is interested. Some plotting capabilities and optimizations are missing but I’m ok with it for now. Feel free to pick it up for own use, modify, etc.