kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 10:54:42PM +0200, Vesa Solonen wrote:
> Great! Please consider how to work with both light and heavy symbols
> though. Eagle model is "heavy", KiCad and gEDA mostly "light". Both have
> their uses, but keeping flexibility and maintainability needs "light"
> approach.

IIRC eagle (at least v5) had three entities:
- Package
- Symbol
- Part (seen as a many-to-many between package and symbol)

I don't remember where subparts were handled (if at the symbol or part
level).

Kicad only have
- Package
- Symbol
And the association is done with an attribute on the symbol instance.

At the moment the thing I miss on the symbol definition in eeschema is
specifying 'default packages' (or wildcards) for different aliases, like
documentation. BC337 and BC817, for example.

Another 'cute' thing to have (only a shortcut, really, nothing vital)
would be to flag a symbol to pop up the value dialog just after
insertion. Example: Instead of R, call it R? (the ? would only give
troubles anyway:P) and seeing the ? after insertion ask for the value. 

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
Logos Srl