Fed up with manually calculating coordinates I made this:
Just a slow and buggy proof of concept but somewhat usable already.
(Check out http://engineerjs.com and http://t-filter.engineerjs.com as well.)
8 Likes
Looks nice; alternative footprint creation tools are always welcome. Do you have any plans to maintain it and release the source?
I just put this together in two days so that I can create footprints for my own projects. But if others like the idea too, I will make it faster, fix the bugs and add some more features. All the source is in javascript, already on the client side. Maybe I will upload it to Github too.
1 Like
looks really nice and straight forward.
+1 
really really nice… waaaww… briliant really… looks easy and more faster to make a footprint… (Y)
That’s really impressive - I can put my calculator away and stop trying to calculate distances from various reference points.
If you have the will and the time, you could take this far - beyond just KiCad (although my interest is only in KiCad!)
Something like this should be inside KiCAD, not just for footprints, but also for edge cuts or essentially anything else that does need the ability to have a more intuitive/interactive way of editing distances/sizes/angles.
That’s really nice! It would be especially useful for those components with oddly-spaced pins, like SD card sockets.
I agree. A functionality for parametric constraints for any object (footprint, graphics etc.) would be great. If you have ability to either enter the coordinates of an object manually (as it is done right now) or constrain the object with dimensions from some other object on the board (which would override manually entered coordinates of the object), that would be extremely useful.
Has the code been released?
I need to do offline work.
Hi! The whole thing runs in the browser (javascript), so you download the code whenever you want. Feel free to improve it. I know that the handling is shit. I am not proud of that.
2 Likes
Thanks for the humility, but this is a great piece of work. I am not a Java programmer but I suggest you make it available for other KiCad (contact them and see what the best way to proceed forward is) developers to enhance it. It really is better than a diamond in the ruff!
What is the download link?
something like:
wget --no-check-certificate -r http://fpmagic.engineerjs.com/
and you’ll get all the html and js code
it seems it works only with chrome
Maurice
eventually just a ‘page - save as’ also works to get all needed files.
just to share my approach on this:
i use the FreeCAD Sketcher to do the calculations
i do this after i have designed the 3d model in freecad- so this is the first check if i have read all datasheet numbers / measured all things correctly…
next step is be to write a FreeCAD plugin that can convert a sketch to a KiCad footprint… (if someone has spare time left pleas do it
)
but yeah - in the end it would also be cool if some of this just directly works in KiCad…
sunny greetings
stefan
3 Likes
One of the best solution I’ve seen. If the module I have is complicated I tend to draw it in a CAD program and then get all the distances. Otherwise I draw it on a piece of paper and then write it down before sketching it again in KiCad. This would be excellent addition to KiCad. As the matter of fact to any PCB development program.
1 Like
FYI - Maurice pointed out it was for personal use and no guarantees.
I downloaded all the files but the dimension would not work locally.
I also confirmed that it will not load under Firefox or IE… only chrome.
It would be interesting to see if others have got it to work locally.
@jwzumwalt
to let the scripts work locally you need to edit index.htm
`
I still do not get it to work with IE.
Do you have a zip file that you have working?
It works only with Chrome
Got it working with Chrome - boy do I feel silly 
It took a few minutes to also point the CSS and icons in the right place.
Here is a 1.1mb zip that can be download and works out of the box.
www.zoomaviation.com/temp/fpmagic.zip