Looking for a card edge footprint for Mini PCIe I found only the footprint for the connector that mates to it, also with daughter board outline, but not the card edge itself: is it missing in the standard setup? Is it elsewhere? Or maybe I just missed it in PCB footprints?
I hereby certify that I am not simply asking someone else to design a footprint for me.
This is an auto-generated message that is in place on the “footprints” section of the KiCad.info forum. If I remove it and ask for a footprint to be designed anyway, I understand that I will be subject to forum members telling me to go design my own footprint or referring me to a 3rd party footprint site.
Searching for existing footprints is a bit of you’ve-gotta-know-where-to-look.
The Footprint editor has a nice string search function that searches though all libraries, and entering “pcie” in that box gives 8 results:
Yes, that’s what I did. Unfortunately they’re just PCIe board edges, not Mini PCIe/mPCIe ones - for which there’s only the counterpart.
Meanwhile, a broader search on the net lead me to a solution https://github.com/laurivosandi/kicad-mini-pci-express
I will try and test this one in the next days, when I’ll probably need it
Oops, my bad.
I skimped over the “mini” part. I’m not very experienced with the different variants of PCIe.
You can also have a look at sites such as snapeda which specialize in collecting and generating footprints for various PCB programs. They make footprints and then use some automated process to spit out footprint libraries for different PCB design programs. Results are apparently usable.
Alternatively. The Footprint editor in KiCad is quite good and easy to use. So if you can get a drawing with measurements of your connector, it’s quite easy (after a little learning curve) to make them yourself. Most of the learning curve will be in the library management, and you also have to do that if you start using footprints found elsewhere.
Thanks, @paulvdh. I’m either not experienced with PCIe as a whole, but as I’ve got an mPCIe slot and a specific need for an expansion device, it sounded a good idea - particularly with the available USB 2 bus on it, that shouldn’t require me much on the software side.
