Symbol generator from PDF - uConfig

Sujith · September 29, 2017, 4:55pm

just found a nice tool ( didn’t tried yet)

davidsrsb · September 30, 2017, 1:30am

Surely this will depend on the PDF being text based or an embedded image?

sebcaux · October 3, 2017, 12:53pm

Hi everyone,
thanks for sharing this project. I am the creator of this tool. I do it on free time many years ago and I forget it.
But it had a good performand and saved a lot of time. So I decided to resurrect it.

To answer @davidsrsb, it is based on text boxes in pdf parsing, using poppler. So it does not work for old scanned datashet with images. It is very fast : about 6s for a 700 pages datasheet with 7 footprints.

For simple testing, I will propose builds for linux and windows.

Do not hesitate to send me ideas or bugs.

Seb

Sujith · October 4, 2017, 2:52pm

Thank you very much for sharing this awesome work.

I didn’t tried this because am on windows and I have to figure out how to do that soon.

Thanks.

sebcaux · October 8, 2017, 9:03pm

Thanks @Sujith

I work hard this weekend to add auto build for Windows. Now you can download pre-built version from the Readme of github page : https://github.com/Robotips/uConfig

I added a command line tool and a minimalist GUI interface for easy testing.

I hope you will like it.

Seb

kontzBern · June 29, 2018, 7:36am

And still works like charm, very nice of them to keep supporting that tool. Nevertheless, there’s some sort of bug is happening from time to time after using this: the PDF from which data was extracted just becomes corrupted. It looks like a blank page actually. So one needs to run this file through the editor, e.g., I used this one https://form-cd-401s.pdffiller.com/ Or more common ones yet slower as well, like Adobe, Cute or something. When you save this document as a new one through the editor everything comes back to normal, but why does it actually happen this way?

sebcaux · June 30, 2018, 9:11am

Thanks for trying @kontzBern. Could you please give me the link of a PDF to reproduce the issue ?

sebcaux · August 16, 2018, 7:02am

Hi everyone,
One year after release this tool as open source, I continue to improve it. I added/improve a lot of things :

Component preview look like Kicad now
Modification of the properties of the component
Pin table search, edit electrical, style and view class of the pin
Minor fixes to improve PDF extraction
Import components from an existing kicad lib

But the real huge new functionality is the PinRuler. This system allows you to reorganize pins by classes. For example, putting all pins of the same port together sorted by the name port or putting power pins on top and bottom. You just need to define a style in a KSS text file (Kicad Style Sheet) with a syntax inspired from CSS3.

I think that this functionality can save a lot of time to librarians. Of course you can use it with the GUI and the command line interface on Windows, Linux and Mac.

I hope you will test it and give a star on Github or feedback to encourage me to continue it.

Seb

KiCADsmktec · September 5, 2018, 11:38am

Indeed this sounds good. Unfortunately, to me it is probably to challanging to get it to work.

sebcaux · September 5, 2018, 11:53am

What is your operating system? I will provide binaries download for each OS but I actually do not have the time to do it.

KiCADsmktec · September 5, 2018, 12:15pm

I use W7. Thanks for offering your help. But do not spend too much time. I can get around with simple boxes and their pins.

sebcaux · September 5, 2018, 12:28pm

The link for windows is inside the README file.
https://ci.appveyor.com/api/projects/sebcaux/uconfig/artifacts/uconfig-win32-v0.zip
Just unzip it and start uconfig-gui.exe in the bin dir.

You can directly opens a lib file or import a pdf and/or lib from the menu or simply drag and drop a file and enjoy.

sebcaux · October 19, 2018, 8:01am

For people who do not test the tool, I published a video to show the actual possibilities :

Please give feedback, positive or not

sid · January 11, 2019, 10:20am

hi Sebcaux, this is a very nice tool , can you please help to export the extracted information of pin no. and pin name into csv or excel? please

thanks

sebcaux · January 11, 2019, 4:08pm

Hi Sid, thanks for your interest.
This tool is done only for Kicad tool and Kicad users do not need CSV export. But you can eventually try Kicad for your PCBs design, it is a powerful electronic CAO.

Rene_Poschl · January 11, 2019, 4:15pm

There is also the option to use kicads pin table to get the data out into for example libre office calc. In current nightly it is possible to select cells (any number of them) and use traditional copy paste from kicad to calc. (I would assume this should also work with excel)
You can then export your csv file from there.

sid · January 13, 2019, 3:31pm

thank you very much for the reply, i tried copy paste from the table displayed in uconfig but that did not work, only one cell got copied. Can you please enable copying the entire table ?

Also i am facing challenge in taking the data for FPGA, how do you use the tool in case of FPGA where the image is in form of BGA

Rene_Poschl · January 13, 2019, 4:57pm

Open the generated symbol in kicad nightly and copy the information from the pin table within the symbol editor.

ahatstat · January 30, 2019, 6:19pm

Sebcaux thanks for making this great tool. I just used it to create a symbol for this 64 pin microcontroller STM32G071. For some reason the tool missed pin 44, but otherwise it worked great. The part is on page 35 if you want to check it out.

sebcaux · January 30, 2019, 9:40pm

Thanks for trying, for this type of issue, please open an issue on github and give all the details and screenshot.