Over 17,000 footprints now part of monostable/kicad_footprints

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I want to announce that I’ve just added a load of (other people’s) footprints to my footprint collection and it now has 17896 kicad_mod files of varying quality (and likely a lot of overlap).

As it says in the readme, it is best used with a development version of KiCAD as that has a footprint search feature.

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None at all. I see a footprint, I add it.

It would be worthwhile, but much more work, to reduce this down to a curated set.

Edit: One thing I do do is make sure KiCAD and my own parser can load all the footprints.

Edit2: I had another thought on the subject of vetting @Andy_P: I totally expect that the libraries of Olimex, Tinkerforge, StefanHamminga, mcous and cpavlina (@c4757p) have been made with care and have been used in designs. There are likely more of that ilk in there but those would be my initial recommendation.

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Do you know for certain that your library duplicates footprints already included in KiCAD’s Github libraries, or is that just a reasonable guess based on how you created your library?

Dale

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I added most of them manually and only recently did a more automated search of footprint repositories on GitHub.

All the official KiCAD GitHub libraries are in the KiCad directory. The way I use this, I namespace the libraries according to their directory/GitHub URL (using the generate_table script). So when I add something from any library its name will be prefixed with the author name, for example:

KiCad/Air_Coils_SML_NEOSID.pretty:Neosid_Air-Coil_SML_1turn_HDM0131A
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Awesome to collect all these footprints. It’s the first step to creating a good database.
Good point about it being a pain to sift through them right now in it’s current state. It’s not very usable… yet.
It’s clear there’s a missing piece of the puzzle to help curate the collection. Like a database with some good tools (interfaces) for users to help organize the footprints, delete inferior duplicates, edit those which need tweaking, etc. I recall seeing some other commercial EDA software now has a user contributed database of parts. Could see how they do it for inspiration.
In the short term it’s going to be more work but in the long term it’ll pay off well for everyone. Many hands make light work.
This sounds like a fun, much appreciated project for someone to take on.

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Thanks for compiling this … I needed to find a audio 3.5mm footprint , did a search and a few footprint matching audio 3.5mm comes up and I selected the ones that I have the physical sample …

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