kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Werner Almesberger <werner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dick Hollenbeck wrote:
> It arrives in the same slot and is shown in the
> same slot as it did on my system.  You may have to buy that symbol :)

Thanks for explaining ! So far, so good ...

> Your template fieldnames, none of which probably exist in the symbol
> when you receive it, will be pushed down however when the symbol
> property editor comes up.

... but this would be a problem for further processing, wouldn't
it ? If I understood you, if I use a symbol without user-defined
fields, my fields would end up starting at F4, while, when using
your symbol, they'd start at F5 or later.

All this wouldn't be so bad if there was some way to get at the
field name as well. A few quick solutions that come to mind would
be to

1) prefix the value with the field name, e.g., FOO=blah,
2) put a record with only the component reference and the field
   names before each data record, or
3) output a table with just component reference and field names,
   either as another section (*) in the .lst file or in another
   file.

(*) Like we have a section by reference and one by value now.

2) and 3) wouldn't help with programs that use solely the position,
but an MRP system that knows about KiCad could easily make use of
the new information. 3) would have the benefit of not changing the
existing BOM output.

Hmm, the more I think about it, the more I like 3).

Of course, access to the names of user-defined fields would also
be useful in the absence of templates. And it would bring us one
step closer to not having to worry about slots at all. Everybody
wins ;-)

- Werner