Itās fully expected to hit a plateau, KiCad is only filling a niche, GitHub otoh represents a majority of random things, mostly code related rather than hardware designs.
So there are around 10k KiCad projects on github?
Can you search for on github for repositories that have a kicad project file extension? (The old ā.proā will have a lot of false positives, but ā.kicad_proā should be quite good.
There are quite a lot of sites collecting (partial) schematic / pcb projects. A bunch of PCB manufacturers share (selected?) projects:
EDA suites based on the ācloudā (Itās just someone elseās computer) do this, such as Easy EDA and even that āaltiumā company. I had a look at those sites, there are some nice projects over there, but 90% or more seem to be forks of other projects. And of course, KiCad itself also has made-with-kicad which lists around 50 projects.
And of course there are also websites about electronics that collect and share projects. Most electronics magazines (if still in existence) have an area for this but there are quite a lot of such sites, varying from mostly shoving advertisements down your throat wile trying to attract people with a bare minimum of projects, to quite elaborate collections of projects. https://www.electronics-lab.com/ seems noteworthy for example, and the projects section on Hackaday
Sometimes I wonder itās worth creating a FAQ article to collect such links. Itās a bit similar to the āwebringā idea, but apparently such attempts have been deprecated by generic search engines which are continually updated, while hand cured lists are hard to maintain.
The Github search API only scans file extensions when you do a file search within a specific repository. You canāt ask it to scan all the repos and select the ones that contain a.kicad_pro file. So you would have to loop across all the repos and do a file scan for each one. Nobody got time for that!
I did re-run the previous search but included a scan of the README files for ākicadā:
for y in {2012..2023}
do
created_on="${y}"
num_kicad_projects=$(
curl -G https://api.github.com/search/repositories \
--data-urlencode "q=kicad in:readme created:$created_on" \
-H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
| jq ".total_count"
)
echo "$created_on: $num_kicad_projects"
sleep 6s
done
This picks up more KiCad projects than the previous search:
2012 118
2013 280
2014 438
2015 731
2016 1001
2017 1397
2018 1640
2019 1970
2020 2837
2021 3188
2022 3394
2023 3574 (extrapolated from 2214 over 0.619 of a year)
Now the stagnation period is replaced with near-linear growth, but thereās some step-change between 2019 and 2020. Letās just blame it on COVID-19ā¦
Glancing at random description strings from 2023, Iād estimate >95% of these recent repos are actual KiCad projects versus code or footprint/symbol files. So itās mainly people using KiCad rather than working on it. Even in this small sample, Iāve come across some interesting dark projects that have never been mentioned in this forum or anywhere else. Once I extract the entire list, interested people can click on the repo links and find worthwhile projects to expose to a wider audience.
An annotated and indexed database of 20000 Open Sourced KiCad projects would be a nice thing to have Especially if it has parametric search to for example exclude the low part count beginner experiments and blinking LED projects, searches for a particular microcontroller (family).
I guess that you can already do something similar like that with githubs search interface. It may be worth creating a FAQ article on how to use github (gitlab, other source code repository sites) effectively for finding KiCad projects or other KiCad related content.
More info on github:
Microsoft acquired Github for USD7.5G (or is that āBillionā money numbers are weird) in 2018 for which was then apparently 30x the yearly revenue while Wikipedia now states revenue in 2022 was One Billion USD. That is an impressive growth for just 4 years and completely mind boggling numbers.
There is the old project Leopart (four years), the component search engine for reference designs used in GitHub. Indexed 8,000 KiCad-projects on GitHub containing 37,000 electronic components as a proof-of-concept.
Hi, Jean. Good project! I watched your video and saw you had the same problems with Github search I did: search is limited to things like the description and readme and wonāt return more than 1000 results.
Iāve got a shell script that replicates the initial web-crawler of your project and stores the repo links in a JSON file. KiCad repos have increased to >19,000 since your talk.
If I decide to push this any further, Iāll definitely look into extending your project. Is the Aisler part lookup service still available?
That is pretty close to 20000 I added up, especially because you added 1350 to extrapolate to the end of this year.
Would it be of use to archive such search data in case microsoft cripples search capabilities?
I think it could also be quite useful to have this as a plugin in KiCad. Maybe preferably with the database somewhere else, so there are no 20.000 people crawling over gitlab every day. What would be a good location for such a database? How big is it?
Yes, itās stored as a 200-Kline, 5MB JSON file. It takes about an hour to generate from scratch (Github rate limits), but would be much faster to update every few days with any new projects. Iām going to store the shell script and JSON on Github along with a simple webapp that displays it as a filterable/sortable table. Anyone can clone it from there and actually run it locally if they want. Iām actually testing it locally now just using python -m http.server in the directory.
Note that ā.kicad_proā doesnāt do what you think. It actually makes Github search look for repos containing both strings ākicadā and āproā.
Especially if it has parametric search to for example exclude the low part count beginner experiments and blinking LED projects, searches for a particular microcontroller (family).