For myself I added a 12mm tactile switch to my libraries. One of things I did, is adding several 3D files (from grabcad) for the different colored button caps.
With just 1 or 2 clicks in this menu I can select a color per button. Quite easy.
You are currently also seeing one green LED (merely happens to be selected at the time of the screenshot) and one red LED (or more orange)
Would it not be a nice addition to the deftault KiCad libraries if several of the LEDs that we have also contain more than link to a step file so we get to add colored LEDs to our 3D viewer without having to add a custom footprint to your own library?
I don’t know much of step files in general. But I can image that a script would be able to do the job right?
I opened a step file of one of those caps and I learned today that step files are human readable.
Yeah this is not at all hard to do, in fact trivial*. The thing is the library project is a bit stringent with the licensing issues so Grabcad can not be the source. Its entirely fine for yourself to do whatever you want but its not OK for kicad or then the library wont be accepted by the linux distributors.
* So the thing is the same way that you don’t consider drawing and wiring a few components in KiCAD is not really complicated. Mechanical engineers view your request in similar vein.
You can try the AKL (Alternative KiCad Library) from the plugin manager.
I installed it recently and it looks like it’s got a fairly decent quality. It is also quite big. It sort of doubles the available “parts” (symbols / footprints) and also the fp-lib-cache file grows from 3.2MiB to over 6MiB. This doubling of parts is also becoming a bit problematic for KiCad. It shows some limitations with only two levels of hierarchy in it’s library.
For example, I do not know of a way to only use the default libraries by default, and only look in the AKL if the default libraries don’t have a proper solution.
