kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 08/07/2013 05:25 AM, Chris Morgan wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 9:50 PM, Dick Hollenbeck <dick@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On 08/06/2013 06:40 PM, Chris Morgan wrote:
>>> Hello.
>>>
>>> Sites like http://www.kicadlib.org/ are great for sharing libraries
>>> but I was thinking that having integrated online library sharing could
>>> better distribute the work while making it easier to share and use
>>> parts. A user could add add trusted sources to their remote libraries,
>>> contribute new parts, vote on parts etc.
>>>
>>> Thoughts? It would probably take a bit of effort to spec out and
>>> implement things, I was thinking of an indiegogo or kickstarter
>>> approach to fund the work.
>>>
>>> Chris
>>
>>
>> This has been discussed numerous times, both for eeschema and for pcbnew.
>>
>> In fact I mentioned it for pcbnew about 4 days ago again.
>>
>> The eeschema conversation is longer, and archives have it already.
>>
> 
> I've done a couple of searches like "kicad online library" and "kicad
> network library" that didn't turn up anything. Were different terms
> used in the discussion?


SWEET

This design is one I wrote as a result of endless emails and thinking about it:

http://dev.kicad-pcb.org/sweet/

In the source tree you find the doxygen source to this design document named new/design.h

SWEET is different than PRETTY in that SWEET is designed to be human writable, human
readable.  Whereas PRETTY was intended only to be human readable.

In the end, I decided that eeschema needed to be rewritten, not adapted.  This is where
you start in a new directory and start over, but are free to copy pieces from the original
work with scrutiny and refinement as you go.

It ended up being too much work for me to fund.  Get about $100,000 and I might be
interested in doing the work.  Some of it is done already however, the parser and I
started writing a GAL client before GAL was a good as it is now.


Dick



> 
> 
>> I don't see why a PCBNEW plugin could not use http protocol to implement the PLUGIN
>> interface.  The PLUGIN interface seems adequate, although we'll see soon how well it fits
>> the needs of pcbnew after the fp lib table work is done.  There is no search mechanism in
>> the API, but pcbnew can search footprints after retrieving them using the API.  That may
>> be adequate, performance wise.  The PLUGIN API, which is an interface, does not prevent
>> caching being used in the implementation.
>>
> 
> Would eeschema require changes to implement a plugin interface as
> well? I'll have to look at the pcbnew plugin api to see.
> 
> 
>> Then there is a server.  For read only access, I think a stock http server could probably
>> work.  Especially if the footprints were stored in the pretty format so they were all in
>> separate files.
>>
> 
> I would think that support for things like pushing new versions of
> symbols and footprints, tracking old versions, meta-data such as who
> created the models, support for 3D models, voting, comments etc would
> be some of the bigger wins with a networked approach. The idea would
> be to build a system that can be in some way self-maintained by the
> users without requiring someone to manually track all of those
> details.
> 
> 
>> wxWidgets has an http client, and although its reputation is not shiny, it might be
>> adequate for something so simple as retrieving short files, and grabbing directory listings.
>>
>> I said before I could write it 3 weeks.
>>
>> Dick
>>
> 
> It might be relatively quick to implement. I'm starting to put
> together a description of the concept, components and features so we
> have something to discuss around. I'll pull in the information from
> the previous discussions if I can find them.
> 
> Chris
> .
>