How do people share Kicad projects with others?
In particular, I use a bunch of custom footprints and schematic parts, but I don’t want to include the whole library – just the parts that folks need.
It looks like the schematic components are in the cache file, but what about custom module footprints? I guess I can manually copy all of the kicad_mod files into the project directory, but that seems a hassle, no?
Footprints are embedded in the schematic file. Not providing your custom footprint libraries will throw error messages, but the board will load and display correctly (exception: 3D view). That should be sufficient to put your design out there.
However, if you plan to have many people do actual work on a layout (assuming same OS for simplicity), it would be best to either have a) all required libraries inside the project directory & the paths set accordingly b) agree upon a file-system layout, required libs & paths before you start any serious work.
This page talks about using the pcbnew Archive Footprints feature to share footprints:
You can also export all the modules in a .brd file at once via: Pcbnew–>File–>Archive Footprints–>Create footprint archive, which will create a new .mod file with all the board’s modules.
I haven’t tried it, but that may solve your problem if it works.
Thanks Madworm. I think that’s basically what I want.
I wasn’t sure if the footprints were working with my copy of the file because I had my own library in the path or if it was because they were stored locally. (With the PCB file?)
Hah. I should have just looked in the .kicad_pcb file. Each of the modules is fully specified in the file. That’s incredibly redundant, but I guess pretty handy.
I suppose I can edit the path in the schematic file to get rid of the library-not-found error as well.
Anyway, thanks for the reassurance that other people will be able to use my work.