Hi,
I’m pretty sure I already know the answer, but is there an official repository for reference designs built using Kicad?
IMHO I think this would be a great feature to have for learning purposes, as well as saving time with real life projects. Something along the lines of the Orcad offering would be a good starting point. Each design would require some form of user experience rating and a comment section for feedback. Needless to say all designs would also need to be open source.
If I could help set this feature up I would certainly contribute, but my skill set is of the hardware variety! I have lots of proven designs which I would happily contribute ranging from 4G modems, imx6 SOMs, to the Kicad design for the Beagle Bone Black development board.
On a side note, the footprint and symbol libraries could also benefit for some form of user feedback, i.e. built a board and the footprint was s**t… sorry incorrect etc.
Thanks for that Marcos,
I meant an integrated solution that can be used from within the Kicad tools. I’m by no means an Orcad fan, but they implement this feature quite well. Yon can search by part numbers or keywords and pull the design straight into the schematic editor. http://www.orcad.com/about/news/arrow-reference-designs
I’m not sure we need a whole new site/repository, but some script-magic that gathers open hardware kicad designs into one list with easy download links and visualizations of the board/schematic etc. would be nice! perhaps this could just be an addition to the “made-with-kicad” page.
Don’t get me wrong ohwr.org is a brilliant concept, but too many different tools (namely Eagle) in play to be usable.
Ideal scenario would be somewhere I can upload my Kicad designs for everyone to use and search from within Kicad itself.
As an example I have dozens of switch mode power supply designs in Kicad, all proven and in production. If PSU design isn’t your gig, just think how useful it would be to simply “pull in a working design” and hey presto!
Of course this scenario applies right across the board - no pun intended.
One thing that KiCad is not short of is ideas for new features. These sort of side features are never likely to get included in KiCad, given the limited developer resources available.
Most of what you suggest could be done outside of KiCad, perhaps even the final bit of opening in KiCad. If you can set up a website and provide some tools for searching etc, it might help to show the usefulness of the feature, but I suspect that not many people would use it.
Probably where all the other crowdsourcing ideas go - many people want to use the service, not many contribute useful content, and even less want to pay for it
Yep, think this is part of the problem. Everyone wants to be the next github, but the market sizes aren’t normally large enough to support the freemium model (or the solely premium model).
Speaking of GitHub, I’m a big fan of the idea of an index simply pointing to good reference designs (wherever that repository is stored), vs updating a site that displays the design. The latter is more likely to go obsolete, especially with the pace of web technologies changing or if the dev of that site doesn’t keep up with the changes in KiCad file format.
If there’s interest, it really doesn’t need to be much more than a list which we can make into a wiki post here on the forum. Feel free to start one.
At least we’re discussing it bobc and Chris,
I really don’t see this as a side project, I see it as a key reason Kicad hasn’t really hurt the paid for options. As a professional engineer the first thing I do (looking at different CAD packages) is look at an example and figure it out for myself. If I have to read instructions I’m gone!
Trust me, if I could develop the software to accomplish this I would. I’m the hardware guy … that loves Kicad! I have huge respect for the developers but I’m not one to implement this feature. If this feature existed I can and will contribute HW designs for all to use.
Obviously we would need a way to rate the contributed designs - 0=fail to 10=built 100K and smiley face
I agree with Chris that a dedicated site probably won’t work. There was (is) a site like this called Solderpad but it’s been very quiet since 2013. It’s just another step to put your design both on there (with little traffic) and Github (with lots of traffic), so Github won.
If most designs are already stored on Github, then you can do something similar to this to index all the KiCad-related projects. Of course, you’ll get a large list of projects with widely-varying quality (and mostly skewed to the bad side because good design + good documentation is rare). Maybe you could do some filtering/grading using the number of stars and forks earned by each project. I don’t know. Sounds like a bit of work that would only be used by a few people.
You can git clone kicad website, add your designs to made with kicad section and create a pull request so its added to the official website. I did so with a couple of boards.
About this topic… I like the idea of official reference designs easier to use and browse than the demos. I would add a “reference designs” item just like the “made with kicad” page.
If we use projects from github they could be easily browsable using eyrie.io which automatically points to the last commit and automatically generates the thumbnails
The designs should be peer reviewed so we can ensure they are both working and well documented.
I say official because as others commented, a 3rd party supporter in charge of reference designs would likely be forgotten.
Heck, we could already set up a simple webpage inside kicad.org just showing all the demo projects in eyrie.io, those demos are already taken as reference by the developers/
Hi Marcos,
Sounds like you have the skills to make this happen. How can I help?
Or do we try it out as Chris mentioned using a wiki. I’m still unclear how we vet and rate the submitted designs. Only high quality “approved” designs should make the cut. How do you accomplish this without offending?
eyrie.io looks great, but nowadays I have learned to ask, “what is their business model?”. To stay around, they need to make money somehow, to at least pay for the servers and support staff. Eyrie is typically opaque for these startups, I can’t see who runs it, what company is behind it, how they are funded, what fees they will charge me, what fees they charge others.
I’ll call this the Trojan Horse model, a tempting offer but you know somehow there are going to be strings attached. Frankly, I am inundated with sites apparently offering “free” services, but I know that either they will fold in a couple of years, or introduce subscriptions (or something).
Looking behind Orcad’s reference designs, it appears to be siliconexpert.com. They are another one of those companies seeming to offer “free” stuff, but less transparent about the strings attached.
I totally agree with you regarding eyrie.io. As for Orcads “free” reference designs you’re already paying for them through the licence fee.
If this feature is to exist it must a Github project like the libraries.
My concern about eyrie is if it will still be around and supported while kicad makes changes to the file format. I also dont remember any time kicad was tied in any way to a commercial 3rd party. Maybe freeroute…
For this use case it would be okay since we only want to show open source designs and that will remain free. They aim to earn money as a sharing and review tool for businesses. I guess they would be happy to have some visibility on kicad, they wanted sparkfun products featured using their platform, it would be a similar use case for kicad website.
Anyway, its just an idea of how can we show kicad designs in a cool way. If you have to rate and evaluate every design, thats a whole new bag of cats. How much testing needs a design to be featured? Who validates the test? How much documentation is a good documentation? What kind of documentation do we want? Should we favor multi page hierarchical designs o single page designs?
Its kind of subjective.
Me personally, if the schematic is proven, easy to follow, has a properly completed BOM, and 3D models can be seen from 3DViewer without touching the project paths, its good to me.
I really like the idea of Eyrie, moreover it would be good to support someone that took its time on creating such a tool and promises to keep it free “Eyrie is FREE and will remain free for students, public designs and a small number of private designs.”, I could use a gallery or a way to get to the featured models, curated models and stuff like that (like Thingiverse, 3DContentCentral or GrabCAD) and like those sites, the best way to keep the quality would be to have a rating system, demanding documentation and best rules development, etc, etc. would only make the entry barrier too high for many people to bother to post something. But if someone does take its time a 5 Star (thumbs up, smilyes, etc) would be almost garanteed.
