KiCad growth based on created Github projects

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The Github search API only scans file extensions when you do a file search within a specific repository. You can’t 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 “kicad”:

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)

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Now the stagnation period is replaced with near-linear growth, but there’s some step-change between 2019 and 2020. Let’s just blame it on COVID-19…

Glancing at random description strings from 2023, I’d estimate >95% of these recent repos are actual KiCad projects versus code or footprint/symbol files. So it’s mainly people using KiCad rather than working on it. Even in this small sample, I’ve 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.

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