kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Alex G <mr.nuke.me@xxxxxxxxx>]

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On 08/01/2010 12:40 AM, Michael Heidinger wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> selecting items from CvPCB can sometimes be difficult if you have
> several thousand of footprints added. Scrolling down and searching
> alphabetically is consuming much time.
> It would be really fast if above the list of the footprints in CvPCB a
> textfield would be added and then you enter the name of the desiered
> footprint and it displays you a list of the awailable footprints.
> 
> Example: Entered "*SOT23*"
> Results eg. "-someprestring-SOT23", "SOT23poststring", "preSOT23post".
> Also a wildcad (* and %) would be great. I'm quite sure that there must
> be some search libs that supply such search functions.
>

I second that.

> I think this additional feature will speed up the design process with
> Kicad.
> 

Not sure about it speeding things up. I usually spend less than 1% of
the time in CvPCB.

What I believe should also be done with the Kicad libs is a major
cleanup. There are a lot of symbols that use weird naming conventions.
Some transistors name their pins E,B,C, some 1,2,3, some G,D,S, some
IC's go with VI, GND, VO, etc. All of the components I named above come
in TO-220 packages. What happens is that you need a different footprint
for each of the naming conventions. You would end up with needing 4
footprints for TO-220 horizontal, 4 for TO-220 vertical when in fact
it's the same package. Add to that TO-92, SOT23, SOT-223, TO-247, and
you end up needing a plethora of redundant footprints. It would be much
more logical to name the pins 1,2,3, and let the footprints take care of
which are which.

> Another feature request for CvPCB ist that all footprints are sorted by
> their lib. I mean it this way: Lets say we have a lib "a" with
> footprints "a1" to "j10"
> and a lib "b" with footprints "a1" to "j10".
> It would be great if it could be displayed this way:
> 
> a
> -a1
> -b2
> -c..
> -j10
> b
> -a1
> -b2
> -c..
> -j10
> 
> If i click now on a it shoud deflate, clicking on it again all items
> should be visable. I think you know what i mean.

Do you mean a DIP, SSOP, TDFN, etc class, each containing let's say
DIP8, DIP10, DIP10, etc?
That would be quite useful, I must admit.

Another thought I have to add to this is getting the darn filtered
footprint list to actually do some useful filtering. That way, you, or
I, or anyone else won't have to go through the entire footprint list for
the majority of symbols, as you probably have noticed is the case with
capacitors.

Oh, and let's not forget the plethora of "missing" footprints from the
default libs. I say "missing" because there are a lot of common
components that really should have footprints, but do not (B-case SMD,
lots of potentiometers, etc). Manually installling extras from
kicadlibs.org is very time-consuming.
I'm actually willing to dedicate some free time to drawing those if
someone can integrate them with the default libs.

Alex G.

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