Highlight footprints for assembly

[pwuertz]

Hi!

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/

Or does such a function already exist?

[davidsrsb]

Highlighting all parts of one value would be in a full pcb view would be very useful for hand assembly

[Joan_Sparky]

There are a couple of scripts external of KiCAD that do something similar to what you want…

This is a start:

Making a good assembly drawing for hand soldering out of the KiCAD PCBNew

Recently I’ve used a complicated procedure which I will even not be able to reproduce step by step. Generally it contains generating of gerber files with a tricky layers on and off and some additional options (like not to plot a references). After that I used online gerber view tool named www.gerber-viewer.com where I uploaded layer after layer and than (luckily) plot the result to PDF. First of all the assembling employee argued that the drawing was not any good: No references (actually it …

[pwuertz]

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.

Here is an example output:

[davidsrsb]

Great work, also useful for rework instructions