I’m seeing instances where people are re-developing utilities that already exist for KiCad. For example, how many BOM tools do we have, now? Also, designers are not aware of all the utilities that exist to make their jobs easier.
To partially remedy this, I created a Github repo that lists KiCad utilities from 3rd parties (i.e., those not working directly with the KiCad source code). If you’ve created a utility, then you can submit it to the list as a pull request.
For those who are freaking out about using Github for this, here’s a page that describes how to submit to the list. If you’re smart enough to create a useful KiCad utility, then you should be able to figure out how to submit a pull request. It can all be done on the Github site; you don’t need to install or use git.
Hopefully, this will cut down on repetition, allow us to build on existing work, and expose these tools to a wider audience.
Dunno whether the point is to add to the useful tools or not, but here’s one (not a tool per se, so can’t add it to the git repo). Since I’m new to the community, don’t know to what extent this is popular around here, but I haven’t found any other tool to create BGA footprints (it also supports QFN, QFP, edge connectors, but since high pin count BGAs are nightmare to create by hand, this is what I appreciate the page most for). The only issue I’ve found so far is, that even if you set to create the footprints in mm instead of mils, the end result is in mils regardless and is 2.54x bigger than expected, so just save your time and convert the dimensions to mils straight from the beginning. So far I’ve used this for DDR ICs, eMMCs, SoC’s and Eth Switch ICs and it works great. However if you wonna use BGAs with different pin sizes and pitch inside the package (like the intel Atoms, where the mid section of pins is with lower pitch and smaller diameter), then this might not work straight out of the box for you (still haven’t figured out how to automate this).
Rohrbacher’s page - I’m not affiliated with the page, nor with its creator in any way - just find it really useful and think someone else would appreciate it.
P.S. You should also know, that once you create the footprint, you would need to import the module, create a new pretty lib from it and then you’d be able to mod it (KiCAD 4.x doesn’t seem to like legacy modules for editing and doesn’t let you to).