I recently upgraded from KiCad 6 to 8 and playing around with database libraries. It’s such a great feature! I’ve been trying to implement a database for smd resistors, grouped by size and sorted by resistance. But it looks like there are some limitations and I’d like to know if I’m right or if anyone can give me a hint:
It looks like there is no way to group entries of a library by an additional field to get a structure like “<database-name> - <library name>” → “<size>/<value>”. Is this correct?
It looks like the entries are always sorted by their key-value, right? Is there a way to force a different order (like the entries stored in the database table (view) or by an additional sort field)?
The only solution I have found is to code size and resistance into the key-value e.g. “RES-0805-A-002.2” for 2.2 Ohm or “RES-0603-B-010” for 10K Ohm and so on.
So the component selector would need to have some kind of filtering (like 1k 0402 basic components), otherwise I don’t see how one could realistically use a database library.
My database library would be also for JLC (LCSC) components. But only for standard components like resistors, capacitors (MLCC) and so on out of the basic / preferred-extended parts pool. So the current symbol selector dialog is fine for me. Just a little bit more flexibility in presentation and perhaps 1-2 more levels for structuring would be welcome.
Not sure if you have tried this, but you could concat multiple columns of the source table into a key of a view. That way sortable keys are made automatically based on fields that you would need to enter anyway.
I have organised my library with KiCad V4. To have in value only resistance I have several R libraries (one resistor size in one library).
R - for 0603 resistors,
R1 - for 1mm resistors (0402)
R2 - for 2mm resistors (0805).