kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Mateusz" <komorkiewicz@...>]

I thought about it for a long time. In my opinion the library system in kicad is quite good but I would like to see it perfect.

What "perfect" means for me? I believe a perfect system would be a system with a central database on web server. User would download the list of available libraries from server and then choose what he want to download (same like apt-get works in ubuntu). Such a system should also provide users with ability of easily share their libraries with other users by pressing just "upload my library" button (now all additional libraries are scattered all over internet).

For me such a database should consist of "proven" and "junk" libraries. Library should be marked proven if it is used in an active working design (letsay a photo to prove it should be enough) and meet the guidelines (there should be somebody like project librarian to aprove it). The "junk" libraries should be all libraries provide by users.

A voting system would also greatly helps to improve this user upload stuff.

In this system every component should have its own library. As to naming convention the only sane thing is to name it: company->literal symbol->digit numbers. Some additional information like if it is a microcontroller or a fpga would also be valuable, but sometimes it is hard to categorize a devicein this manner.

What you think about that? I know it is hard to do, but don't you think that such a feature would make kicad unique among EDA programs? Just think about linux before apt-get era!

Embedding in kicad tools like http://kicad.rohrbacher.net/quicklib.php would be great. I also think about some conversion programs such as bsdl2lib converter (I have some working code to simple parse the bsdl files). Files inBSDL format are provided by most manufacturers (Xilinx,Altera,Freescale,TI,Atmel etc.) that would allow us to easily make some new great libraries.

Pleas tell me what you think about my ideas.