I can’t figure out how to get basic components in kicad. Every time I download the DigiKey components form GitHub I never get the resistor or capacitor??? I’m current using version (5.1.9-0-10_14) on a Mac. My operating system is Catalina version 10.15.1.
What exactly did you download?
Where did you store on your system ?
Did you add that location to the component path in the project manager ?
What do you expect to get? AFAI can see, there are no resistors or capacitors in their libraries. Their purpose is different – to offer ready made libraries for certain specialized components which they have hand picked from their catalogue.
So how do I get a library with basic components because every time I download version (5.1.9-0-10_14) on my Mac the library that comes with that kicad version does not have resistors, capacitors, etc??
Do you have “R” and “C” in the devices library?
No I don’t and when you say devices library are you talking about in eeschema? Sorry I’m really new to kicad.
I don’t have the digikey library.
The following all relates to the standard library that should be installed with 5.1.9 on Mac:
In eeschema, press “A” to add a symbol, click on the sheet, and the “Choose Symbol” window should come up.
One of the libraries is “Device”. Expand that and you’ll find “C” for capacitor, “R” for resistor, “L” for inductor, “D” for diode, etc. There are also variants: “CP” for polarized capacitor, “R_US” for resistors drawn the U.S. way as a zigzag, etc.
If this is not the case for you, please post a screenshot of the Preferences -> Manage Symbol Libraries window.
every time I try to save a schematic this appears
Directory “/private/var/folders/w0/y9fqmwtj2gj45csg_v26_v9w0000gp/T/AppTranslocation/27871DB7-BBF8-4043-9F76-B8D8E641711D/d/kicad.app/Contents/Applications” is not writable.
The saving is a different issue (although possibly the same cause) so I’ll leave that for your other thread.
I can see that you have the device library installed from your screenshot. EDIT: actually, looking closer, that doesn’t look like a real path for the device.lib. It looks like you just have the digikey library installed and not Kicad’s standard library. Can you try to reinstall the library? I’m not sure what the easiest way to do that is on macOS…
What happens when you try to add a symbol (press A and click) and scroll down to the “Device” lib? can you add a screenshot?
Going from your screenshot:
If you look with the file browser in /Applications/KiCad/Device/ what do you see? If there is a file called Device.lib in there then you should be able to use its content (assuming you got the correct lib then there should be a symbol for a resistor in there)
In general i notice that the path to this library does not really look like it would look like in a standard kicad installation. Normally the path would be ${KICAD_SYMBOL_DIR}/Device.lib (on version 5.1.x)
While this in of itself is not an issue it is an indicator that you might not have installed the libraries when you installed kicad. Note that the libraries are in a separate package in most operating systems and i seem to remember Mac is also one of the split ones.
If this is the case then you can either install them from the installer or download the libraries from gitlab and install them similarly to how you installed the digikey library.
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