I often find myself always having to make parts and footprints for weird components. It would be nice to have a system in place where when a user creates a symbol or footprint those get uploaded into an database that everyone can access. These parts should have a system to verify or rate the component. If the parts get say 10 approved ratings, then they automatically get moved into the master library. In the short term it would give access to 1000’s of parts in the long term the users are populating the database with known good components.
That’s an easy thing to achieve: send your footprints and symbols to a librarian, make sure they are KLC compliant. Your parts will be added to the standard libraries.
I was hoping KiCadCloud would turn out like that, but there was no ratings system. It was also a bit difficult to search. Kicadcloud went offline a while ago.
To be honest though, I’m not sure crowd sourcing works really well for technical data. It still really needs a curator (otherwise users put random tags, or none) and some approvers to give a consistent eye to quality. Regardless, it still needs an admin to run the web server, keep out hackers and vandals, do updates etc, all of which takes a lot of time, and no one really wants to pay for the service, adverts are perhaps the only revenue source, and such a site probably has a low click count.
I’ve been going through the TTL and CMOS logic libraries, and finding several errors which would screw up a PCB, as well as more minor things like outputs set as inputs. I’m slightly surprised there don’t seem to be issues raised on them, perhaps people don’t use them much.
When I have time I want to improve the library checking scripts, they didn’t pick up the errors I found. I also have a dream of an interactive GUI type tool which flags the issues on screen, and does automatic fixes if possible…