kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Werner Almesberger <werner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> You seem to be especially concerned about a manufacturer field within
> the symbol becoming obsolete.

Yes, or the field having an almost arbitrary value from a vast
set, e.g., in the "any 100 k resistor" case.

> But for the mean time WRT template fieldnames, you are not required to
> add a "Manufacturer" field to your template fieldnames.

Yes, I understand. Seeing all those "manufacturer" examples was
just a big red warning light popping up. Sorry for diverting the
thread.

> One idea is that the BOM generator could maybe take a CSV file as INPUT,
> and the CSV file would map symbol value to manufacturer, vendor, and
> maybe price.

I think CSV files would make a nice interface, particularly if
combined with some editing facilities in the BOM generator that
help to maintain referential integrity.

This would also allow the BOM generator to be developed apart
from the main KiCad codebase, which is probably a good thing in
the long run. (And it might give me a chance to play, too :-)

The tables that further describe parts and distributors could
be maintained outside the KiCad core. Since they're not
project-specific, they could be shared among projects and even
among users.

> Attached is a sample output from my Java based BOM generator.  The trick
> I used here is to only define the Manufacturer/Vendor once *per
> schematic* (the library is not involved).  The collating pass merges all
> components sharing the same value.

Looks very nice. How does your system know that C1 is a
TAIYO YUDEN TMK105BJ104KV-F ?

- Werner