kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo_bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----

> From: László Monda <laci@xxxxxxxx>
> To: Chris Morgan <chmorgan@xxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: "kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Friday, August 9, 2013 4:39 AM
> Subject: Re: [Kicad-developers] Online library sharing idea
> 
> Chris & Andrew,
> 
> You're both welcome to publish your findings regarding your design
> decisions.  I believe it'd be worthwile to peer-review and discuss
> different approaches.
> 
> I consider CircuitHub the best solution so far.  I think Dropbox
> integration is its best feature but its user interface never seemed
> intuitive to me and I'm not in peace with its basic principle - I
> really think that allowing every user to upload their own libraries is
> a recipe for disaster.  Having 10 different kinds of 74HC595s, half of
> which is broken is not good for anyone.
> 


Yes, that is why there needs to be guardians to enforce quality. Even looking up questions and responses about extremely simple devices - the Arduinos - shows that the vast majority  of content is bullshit.  Without rather anal quality control, I suspect any librarian project is doomed.  Of course with hundreds of thousands of components out there, this is guaranteed to be a fun job. For professionals to consider any such footprints, we must also be able to verify if they conform to some particular standard and what relevant clauses they conform to.

> A powerful and user-friendly parametric library and footrprint
> generator would be so much useful to have.
> http://www.compuphase.com/electronics/kicadlibrarian_en.htm is by far
> the best implementation of this concept.
> http://kicad.rohrbacher.net/quicklib.php also nails the idea even
> though I think its user interface is terrible.
> 
> For one-off parts maybe it'd useful to have something like CircuitHub
> but only if there'd be a set of parts approved by librarians
> (administrators of the site).  Without librarians this approach seems
> to lead to chaos.
> 
> I'd be interested in developing a web-based library and footprint
> generator eventually and maybe being a librarian by time.  So far I've
> created http://mondalaci.github.io/dxf-to-svg-to-kicad-pcb-converter/
> which solves a different problem but I believe it demonstrates the
> power of a very intuitive web user interface that just works.  This
> could be done for footprints, too.
> 


I'd just like to add - with the complexity of modern board manufacture and stuffing, a really helpful library would also specify and require or recommend layers for top/bottom mechanical keep-out, courtyard, and about half a dozen others.  There have been a number of discussions about this in the past but everyone has been too busy to sit down and sort it out.  If someone comes up with a very good plan, it may even be possible to enforce special layers within KiCAD itself. I think this will become more important as more cheap board stuffers pop up and make it affordable even for hobbyists to create boards with BGAs, QFNs and other package designs which are near impossible to reliably assemble without specialized equipment.

- Cirilo