kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Joseph Baker <jbaker@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I've been working on a dedicated bill of materials management tool to
augment Eagle's quite basic BOM script (see
https://github.com/jbaker0428/Eagle-BOM-Manager/). That being said, I've
hit the limits of the free version of Eagle and am working on switching to
Kicad permanently. Kicad appears to have equally limited functionality in
this area, so I want to make my tool compatible with both programs.
However, I don't think I can properly support component attributes given
how Kicad currently exports them to CSV (the same applies to other output
formats, but CSV is what I happen to be using). The problem is this:

The column names in the outputted CSV file are always named Field1 -
Field8. Each the field columns of each component row contain the value of
the fields in question. However, there does not appear to be a way to
output the actual names of the fields in question for each component. I
can't do anything useful without those field names. In addition, there
appears to be no way to output the "Chip name" component attribute.

Fortunately, I think this can be fixed without fundamentally altering how
component fields work. Here's what I would like to do:
-Add a checkbox to output "Chip Name" under System Components.

-Either:
Split the current Field columns into 2 columns per field (name and value).
The problem I see with this solution (and the current implementation) is
this: What happens if a component has more than 8 fields, or is that not
possible? As it appears that I can in fact add more than 8 fields to a
component, I have to wonder why the current BOM implementation can only
output the first 8.
-OR-
Replace the "FieldX" columns with a column for each attribute name present
in the schematic, with blank entries for components that do not have an
attribute by that name (this is what Eagle does). This could cause
erroneous behavior in my tool if multiple components use a default field
name for different things, but that is an error condition I can handle.


A few questions:
I see a similar blueprint here:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/kicad/+spec/bill-of-materials. Should I
modify this, or post my own?

Should I be working off the stable branch, or testing?

As a longer-term goal, would there be interest in an building an adaptation
of my BOM management tool directly into Kicad (outside of Eeschema)? This
would allow for much more powerful project-level BOM/component sourcing
management (kind of like this:
http://wiki.altium.com/display/ADOH/Live+Links+to+Supplier+Data) without
needing to manually update an intermediary CSV file like my current version
requires.


Regards,
Joe