kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo_bernardo@xxxxxxxxx>]

>________________________________
> From: Carl Poirier <carl.poirier.2@xxxxxxxxx>
>To: Cirilo Bernardo <cirilo_bernardo@xxxxxxxxx> 
>Cc: KiCad Developers <kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
>Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2014 7:23 AM
>Subject: Re: [Kicad-developers] 3d models in .pretty repositories?
> 
>
>
>3D models could be retrieved only as needed, like footprints. I don't see how this would be more polluting than in kicad-library which is installed locally.
>
>
>I know the github plugin serves only footprints. That's why I wonder how hard it would be to adapt it.
>


The issue is how to adapt things so that they are useful and not make the code
unmaintainable. If 3D models are to be retrieved from the network then this
will touch the 3Dviewer, VRML exporter, and in the future the IDF exporter; no
one wants to maintain network related code in all these tools.
So first of all we need to abstract things so that at least these 3 tools
are not really aware that they are performing a network access - so I would
look into abstracting the file loading operation and investigate if it is
possible to do this for the current footprint code as well as the VRML and IDF
code. To speed up operation it would be good to create local copies as data is
downloaded and this local cache must be checked before downloading a model on
the network - once again this can be done via a file loading abstraction.
It would also be good to check md5 hashes of the data and allow the users to
update a model if desired.

This file loading abstraction might also serve eeschema in the future for
accessing schematic symbol files. I think that doing a good job of implementing
3d model downloads via the net is not a small job. Although a quick hack will
not be that difficult I don't believe it would be maintainable either, especially
not as tools using 3d models are added in the future; I don't think anyone
wants to create yet another refactoring job.

- Cirilo