kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Miguel Ángel Ajo <majopela@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Cirilo, awesome work.

   Don’t want to delay the merge, that’s something on what we could work afterwards,
but, are you aware of the higher lever scripting layer we started working on from Piers  
proposal? [1]


   I’m trying to splice his work into modules to have a very coherent and well documented
python API for KiCad at user level.

The idea is to keep the modules as:

kicad
kicad.pcbnew
kicad.eeschema   (when we get into such thing..)
kicad.gerber


may be we could expose your 3D API from kicad.vrml  ?

We adopted the naming convention of xxx_xxx_xxx for function names, and Xxxxx for classes,
and we are building a higher level python API over the C++ bare implementation, and we don’t
plan to break that one to avoid breaking off anybody’s already existing scripts.

We could do the same on top of your 3D api, or we could go and do a follow up patch to normalize
all function names. (I see you tight controlled how python naming is exposed based on the C++ API),
probably the 1st option is going to be the most flexible.

The intention is that [1] is very well documented for all users, and merged back to the kicad code  
base (when mature enough) so it’s widely available to everybody, and so we can fix any breaking
changes on the C++ API by updating the python layer.

I would also be very happy about making python-scripting a 1st class citizen by getting [1] merged
and, getting all the stable builds with Python, so this is widely available to everybody in the next
release. But I want to start a discussion about that.

One question:

   Is it currently possible (from python), to build a 3D model, and attach it to a module right away?,
that would be amazing from the footprint wizard perspective. (I didn’t have enough time to fully
dig into your code).


[1] https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-python/ (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/programs/ab.html)


Miguel Ángel Ajo


On Wednesday, 4 de February de 2015 at 03:34, Cirilo Bernardo wrote:

> I know we're aiming for a release in a few months but I would like some comments on the proposal to merge my (old) 3D model tools (current branch: https://code.launchpad.net/~cirilo-bernardo/kicad/vrml_tools).
>  
> The source code has been modified to conform to KiCad style and compilation/installation has been tested on MSWin and Linux. The only thing lacking is the documentation which is currently half translated from LaTeX to asciidoc, but the original documentation in LaTeX and PDF is still available on the project's old SourceForge site.
>  
> The changes touch the main CMakeLists.txt file, the Boost discovery/download script, and the utils/CMakeLists.txt file but otherwise make no other changes to the source. Like utils/idftools the tools are practically a separate unrelated project.
>  
> There was a post many weeks ago on the library-committers list suggesting that the project be hosted on github alongside the kicad/Library repositories but there were no responses to that suggestion. I think it would be a good idea to put the tools into the product branch since it would make the tools more accessible to users and will hopefully be used more. The various existing scripts already generate over 6000 VRML models of excellent visual quality and whose dimensions correspond to published component dimensions.
>  
> - Cirilo
>  
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