I have had to download many symbols and footprints from a variety of places to achieve my designs. What I end up with is individual ‘components’ in my populating my KiCad library list.
What I would like to do is have one library called ‘My Library’ which shows up in the library list with my components under neath say. Then all I would have to do is save the new component in a certain place and have them automatically populated and showing up ready to pick in Scheema. Obviously have footprints do the same thing.
Your basic thinking is quite correct, not wrong. Most of us who have done more than a handful of boards use some form of custom libraries for symbols and footprints. If you gathered a dozen of us in a seminar and asked about our library systems, you would come away with at least 15 ways to do it. Some of our approaches simply grew spontaneously; others were copied from other places (such as employers, clients, or other professionals); and others were carefully thought out and organized before we used them (and, likely as not, carefully re-thought and re-organized a time or two since we started using them).
There are several articles among the KiCAD “Frequently Asked Questions” that relate to your question, either directly or indirectly. Spend a little time studying them.
Rene - I read the information contained in the link before I posted my question. Didn’t think it applied in my situation
DChisolm - Great thanks. Now I know this is possible in KC then I will spend time delving deeper into the help system and start playing with some settings.
To get me started, within my new ‘My Library’ folder, would I setup two subfolders for Symbols and one for Footprints or just lump everything together underneath ‘My Library’
Yeah fair comment will do - I have gained enough information here and youtube to read the link and extract information. I needed some base info to build my learning curve
Ref Ver 5.1.4
Read this to the end before following the steps.
The easiest thing to do is open the Symbol Editor, on the top line select FILE and NEW LIBRARY
Navigate to:
My Docs or wherever you keep your projects
Create a directory name Library
Navigate into Library dir
Place the new lib here
give it a name of your choice
Now you have the structure to do the steps in the link Rene provided.
When you make a custom/personal footprint lib, put it under the same general Library folder. It will be created in a similar manner.
This is actually explained in follow-up links (inserted directly in the relevant sections) found in the faq article i linked above
These articles even explain it with screenshots.