I hereby certify that I am not simply asking someone else to design a footprint for me.
Hi total noob in KiCad (and computers and software in general), am trying to improve.
So I’m following a guide on designing a PCB. This one PCB Guide Part 2 - Beg... | Keyboard Designer Wiki @ ai03.me . Right now I’m at the step where I need to add footprints to the components. For one of those components I need to add footprints of an imported library. However there are no footprints in the library I added. I probably did something wrong, but I can’t figure out what I did.
What does the entry in your library table look like? For example my personal footprints live under:
/home/me/lib/kicad/My.footprints
and inside at the first level are the *.kicad_mod files. (The directory doesn’t have to be called *.pretty, that’s just a convention some peope use.) I notice that the github repo you pointed to has several *.pretty subdirectories and *.kicad_mod files inside. Each of those should be a separate library entry.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean with v6. I have git version 2.38 on windows 10.
I have all the libraries saved locally, so they’re like github/project/MX_Alps_Hybrid.pretty. Should I separate all the files from MX_Alps_hybrid an just out them directly in the project folder?
Have you added that directory to the footprint library table? It’s Preferences > Manage Footprint Libraries from the top-level launcher. KiCad doesn’t scan directories for footprints or symbols, that’s a misconception. The directories have to be added to the Footprint or Symbol library tables, respectively. So if you are going to use those libraries with other projects you may wish to save them outside of your project directories.
Open Kicad, click “help” then “about Kicad”
The page you now have open has a button in the top right corner “copy version info”
Click that, then paste into this forum.
Hi @Michael_Wang
If you are using Kicad 6, there is a better “Getting Started” tutorial here.
You appear to have come unstuck with the library system.
You can use directly, in your project, any symbols and footprints that exist in the Kicad libraries.
If you wish to use any imported, created, or modified (from Kicad Libraries) symbols or footprints, they must be first placed in “Personal Libraries” before they can be accessed and used.
So your workflow is:
Create a personal library
Import the Git footprint to that library
Associate the footprint, now in your personal library, to your symbol.
Update PCB from Schematic, which will place that footprint on your PCB.
