I hereby certify that I am not simply asking someone else to design a footprint for me.
Is there a ready made schematic symbol and footprint for the STM32F103 bluepill breakout board?
Alternatively I’m thinking of putting two female contact rows in a 6x2.54mm distance on a circuit board. And, excuses, I’m a total KiCad beginner.
Welcome.
Designing symbols/footprints is easier than many people assume and from time to time we have here someone who spend hours searching made by someone symbols/footprints to then find that when using them he get some Warnings and Errors and ask here what to do with these errors.
I have never even tried to search other than KiCad library footprints but started from learning how to design them myself.
The problem of having sockets and something inserted in these sockets probably have no one good for everyone solution till now.
It depends if you want to have at schematic only a controller symbol (I don’t know what bluepill breakout board exactly is and don’t want to know it) with all I/O pins clearly seen in it or you want to get correct BOM having all 3 elements (2 sockets and a controller board). Or may be you want to order your PCB with only these sockets so you don’t want controller board be listed in BOM.
Generally think of KiCad project as of PCB design and not device design. If you assume something is to be assembled at PCB than it should be in your project, but if not it shouldn’t be.
So it is possible that the only parts of your project are two sockets. The problem with it is that you probably want to see at schematic I/O lines named.
I’m not using any controller board inserted in sockets so didn’t searched the best solution for it. For shielding cover inserted on soldered to PCB frame I have made symbol to be used at schematic and designed a footprint for it having no pads at all - just the courtyard rectangle to have at schematic both (frame and cover) and also at PCB both.
Interesting project. But not in my present scope.
Actually my sole intention was, to use the KiCad schematic editor to draw a schematic of a test setup where I have a carrier board with some socket rows
soldered into an experimental board and learn to use the schematic editor along the way.
Could someone give me a short aid:
I placed two Conn_1x20_Socket symbols into the schematic but forgot to assign them a footprint. Is it possible to assign the a footprint in hindsight?
Or better delete them and chose new ones from the symbol chooser?
Default KiCad workflow is to draw a schematic and then assign footprints to all symbols. I have never done it but there have to be function to do it.
Ah, thanks. Nice feature.
I have not used the bluepill (though I dabbled with the ancient f103 many years ago until I found the f0 and f3 families fit my needs better). However, when the pandemic created a vacuum in the supply chain and all stm parts were 52+ week leadtime, I used a dfrobot blackpill for a small-volume product and it worked quite well. The blackpill uses an f411 which is much more powerful than the f103 (if you have not invested time in developing code for the 103 yet, you might peek at it).
As folks have said, it is really not that difficult to make a symbol, and once you do you will be empowered to build a personal library of parts. You can place the pins in an order that pleases you. This is my blackpill symbol, where I put 5Vin so it is supplied from the left, the 3.3V out flows to the right, the rst/ pin is up beside 3.3 for a pullup, and I could label the pins for the peripherals I was using:
For the footprint you can just modify a 40-pin dip – I just added a little rectangle to show where the usb connector was located.
spending some time in looking at the project you would have reached the footprint
Interesting. Looks like LISP. I’m not that versed in KiCad (yet 
) that I can say now off hand where this piece of code has to be pasted in that it becomes a ready to be used symbol.
You don’t paste it anywhere, you can import the MOD file as a custom footprint.
Just a note: symbol and footprint are two different things. .kicad_mod files are footprint files.
As a curiosity, the direct answer to the quoted question is that you can create a new footprint from scratch in the footprint editor and actually paste the “LISP” code (really s-expression code) to the canvas. One of the wonders of KiCad…
Nice. I was able to import it into a new footprint but pasting the text into the canvas did not work. Kicad 7.0.7
The post above includes only truncated text, did you copy the original? I used KiCad v9.
Sure. I went to the github site and clicked the copy button. Also copied/pasted the raw text window (not trusting the copy button )
This is interesting for me personally, but otherwise only marginally because v7 is old and unsupported. In general, text copy and paste has worked at least since v6.
The footprint is from v4, maybe v7 can’t handle that with raw copypaste.
Most of those MCU modules (the Arduino UNO is the sore thumb exception) have a regular DIP footprint and are easy to generate with the SIP/DIP footprint wizard which allows you you specify not only the number, rows, and spacing of the pins but also the courtyard.
I would recommend against the personal library because that makes the project less portable. You should put all footprints you create in a project local library. You can still have that personal global library but then you should copy the footprint to the the local library. I have recieved kicad projects from my clients and you get this error saying the footprint cannot be located because it is not in the project folder. You can rebuild the footprints but it takes a bit of time.
Nowadays the PCB file contains a copy of all footprints used, obsoleting project local libraries.
No, project local libraries aren’t obsolete.
If you don’t have the library available, you can’t easily continue the design so that you for example add a new symbol and update the PCB, even if you want just a footprint which already exists in the PCB. Sure, you can share the design and it can be inspected and even exported to e.g. gerber, but it’s not self contained for further editing until you have the same library.
