I was going through looking for possible invnetory programs for electronics and I came across 2 that I like, inventree and Part-DB.
They have a feature there for KiCAD where I can do HTTP library and have KiCAD connect to the program.
This seems useful. But I am wondering, what is the use case for this feature?
If I already have all of the parts (symbols and footprints) in KiCAD, why would I need it to connect out to a parts database? Am I able to monitor current stock in my inventory?
It means that you no longer need to maintain the metadata ( things like part numbers, other characteristics) in KiCad symbols. Instead the KiCad symbols only become the graphical elements. This also means that you can use one KiCad symbol to represent many different parts, in a more flexible way than you can using methods built-in to KiCad such as symbol inheritance.
I see, that is not too bad. So in KiCAD, I would just have generic parts like symbols and footprints and then in the parts database, I would have specifics about each part that would then reference off of the generic parts that I created