I want to apologize, up front, if I come across as extremely frustrated, but in reality, I am, so here we go:
I can report that I’m working in KiCAD 8.0.0 (Downloaded in the last few days) and there are still no THT DIP sockets (at least that I can find) in the libraries that ship with the package.
Is anyone aware of a viable 3rd party library of THT DIP sockets that they could recommend?
I also have things like breakout boards that I do NOT want to solder directly to the board, so to use them, I also need inline pin sockets at 2.54mm spacing. I can find what I think are those parts in the shipping library, but it’s 100% not clear how to use them and associate them with the part that will plug into them. I’ve watched several hours of YouTube videos, read probably a dozen threads here, and what I’ve found is a lot of questions and few to no answers, at least ones that I can understand. I know that thru-hole parts aren’t “cool” any more, but they are still widely used for early prototyping. If I were a pro working for a company, and had a fully-baked design, at this point, I’d run off and use whatever AutoDesk sells for an EDA but as a prototyper, I’ve really appreciated that there’s an affordable tool (that’s not subscription based). If I bailed to some other package I’d have to pay thousands of dollars, learn a new package, and hope for the best. It’s my belief that these parts are a lot more common than the librarians apparently give them credit for.
The closest thing I’ve seen to an “answer” is to somehow find a socket part (not possible or at least non-trivial, in my experience) put it off in a corner on the schematic, and then wire everything as if it was directly connected to the part that will plug into the socket. This may add the socket to the BOM, but I can’t understand how it would explain to a PCBA (assembly) house in East Asia how these things actually go together. How do they know that the specific part that goes in footprint X is supposed to be the socket and not the thing that goes in the socket?
Sure. I could exclude all this stuff from the BOM and solder them all in myself, but if I’m doing that, it defeats much of the purpose of paying for PCBA services. Similarly, assuming I had a socket from the library to do anything with, what should I do? Just plop it into the schematic, in place of the part that plugs into it, wire it up as best I can without any annotations from the plug-in part’s datasheet, and hope for the best? I can’t even begin to emphasize how frustrating this is.
Could someone please kindly explain to me how to achieve a workflow like this, that will allow the use of PCBA services? Thanks.
Regards,
Ian