I created a BOM generation plug-in for Kicad called Kibom. It is produces output in Tab Separated Value (TSV), PDF and RTF format. New formats are easy to add. Components are sorted, combined and filtered.
The goal is to have a usable BOM generated directly from the schematic, with minimal/no editing afterwards. The TSV format can be copy/pasted into most spreadsheets (including LibreOffice, Google Sheets and Excel), and the table in the RTF output can be copied into most word processors.
Kibom is written in C# and compiles with Mono, but I have not been able to test it on Linux etc. If someone has a suitable system and would like to try it, I’d love to have full cross-platform support.
The sorting and filtering engine is quite solid here and easy to extend, so my hope is that people will contribute to the project by modifying it for their needs.
bom_footprint substitute footprint name
precision e.g. 1%, X5R
bom_note text of note
bom_partno manufacturer's part number
The footprint name field is because Kicad footprint names are not very readable. There is also the substitution system that can handle standard stuff, but particularly when you do custom footprints for random connectors and the like it really helps.
If a standard emerges for the MPN I’ll support it.
Is there any compiled version available? I’m just after 4022 -> 4.0.4 upgrade, shocked that the standard BOM output have been removed, and in the need to generate BOM without much hassle. The GITHUB project is incompatible with my VS install.
OK, so where should I look for it? I need the BOM with each part in a separate row, with user defined fields included. Based on the user defined PART ID in the BOM I’m doing inventory lookup and get all the details I need from there.
Another contributor is compiling for MacOS X. I will look at doing Linux binaries but hopefully it should build from source. What is the preferred release format for Linux?
Note that it’s still beta. I need to add some features, like a version string, and decide what to do about the config files (should there be a default set, in a default location with per-project override etc?)
KIBOM looks for the input files in the root directory of current drive, while should look for them in current directory,
KIBOM crashes when cannot find input file (e.g. KIBOM.exe in x:\temp\kibom\kibom.exe, same place board.xml KICAD output), “File not found exception” with KIBOM looking for x:\board.xml…
Now I’m looking to get custom fields in the output BOM.
OK, managed to get what I need with just basic office tools.
Libreoffce calc can import generated XML via Data > XML source.
Excel imports XML directly.
There I’m at home
Hi kuro68k,
Thanks for your reply. First I’ve tried with all the files located in the x:\temp\kibom folder. However kibom wanted to see the initial *.txt files in root folder of x:\ , so it’s not the simple case it wants everything placed where XML is located.
