kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo_bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>]

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

> From: Tomasz Wlostowski <tomasz.wlostowski@xxxxxxx>
> To: Henner Zeller <h.zeller@xxxxxxx>; KiCad Developers <kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: 
> Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2014 9:54 AM
> Subject: Re: [Kicad-developers] PATCH: making component choosing (much!) more usable
> 
> On 02/12/2014 09:34 AM, Henner Zeller wrote:
>>  Hi,
>>  Choosing components in the schematics editor is very cumbersome right now.
>>  (...)
>> 
>>  So I sat down and thought about how it _should_ be.
>> 
>>  This is what I came up with, see patch:
>> 
>>     - interactive search-as-you-type
> 
> Hi Henner,
> 
> I just compiled eeschema with the patch. The browser is simply 
> *awesome*! I sincerely hope we'll see more cool stuff from you :-)
> 
>>  There is another feature I'd like to add in a separate patch: show a 
> little
>>  drawing of the currently selected component in the left bottom corner
>>  (left blank right now) when selected with the mouse popping up the library
>>  viewer. I left it as a dummy in this patch as I didn't want to make it 
> too big.
>>  (...)
>>  Of course, you might have suggestions - let me know what to improve.
> 
> 
> Few extra features that came to my mind:
> - footprint/3D preview,
> - browser as a dockable window instead of dialog,
> - possibility to assign the footprint on the schematic,
> - and save the above to the SCH library.
> 
> This may soon become possible thanks to the DLLization work being done.
> 
>> 
>>  Download it here:
>> 
> https://github.com/hzeller/kicad/compare/master...component-chooser-experiment.diff
>> 
> BTW. Are you using git-bzr-ng or some other tool to work on bzr repos 
> with git?
> 
> Cheers,
> Tom
> 
> 


I like the idea of the previews - but to save computation time on 3D model
previews, I would suggest that we create PNG images which can be loaded.
If the PNG image does not exist then generate one. In the case of 3D models
an orthographic view is probably the best generic option. Some of the more
detailed models can be several MB in size (easily 6MB for a simple model)
so I suspect this can really slow things down when doing a preview without
a precomputed view. The challenge then is deciding on an image pixel size
which can be scaled to whatever frame size a user has without losing too
much detail and without being too big.

- Cirilo