KiCad + Windchill?

Community Feature Request Chat
1

Hello all,

I tried to search if here is Windchill integration existing/planned for KiCad, does anyone have any clue?

Also, is there any PLC integration within KiCad?

Thanks

2

Please add relevant links to background information when you ask something. There are curious people who might even read them but don’t care to find themselves.

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3

I highly doubt that there will be direct integration in such tools.

4

I guess no such kind of integration is there within KiCad.

5

Whether you mean PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) or PLC (Programmable Logic Controller), the answer is no. (Windchill is a PLM package).

In general, KiCad doesn’t integrate with any specific third party package, apart from maybe Freerouter and ngspice.

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6

I have some experience with PLM integration (not with Windchill but with other software, and not with KiCad). What kind of integration are you hoping to accomplish? I’m not sure KiCad has the relevant features right now to make PLM integration make sense.

7

Oh sorry, it meant to be PLM!

Basically, within software (in this case KiCad) you would have features to check-in and check-out the files & handle revisions. There is other features too but this is mainly basic stuff. I expect its not very complex but no one seem to looked at it yet.

8

It sounds like Windchill is a combination of PLM and file version control system (not all of them work this way).
In this case, the integration with KiCad would mostly be “UI sugar” since the underlying operations just happen to KiCad files. I don’t think anyone has looked at this because it has never come up before (and also, we’d have to have a developer with knowledge of and access to whatever PLM systems people want to support).

I think the best way to do this is with external tools. If Windchill has an API, perhaps you can write a Python script to aid in integrating it.

(I think most people around here use Git to store designs if they are using a VCS)

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9

The issue here is “which PLM to target”. I think a better direction on the KiCad end would be to implement python plugins to the project manager window. That way anyone can create a python plugin to integrate at the project level with the desired PLM or VCS or other such revision tracking system. I don’t know if a python API is planned for the project manager level, and if it is I don’t know what the target is or even if a target release has been decided on…

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