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
