kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Simon Küppers <Simon.Kueppers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,
Thanks Wayne for approving me to the developers mailing list.
I am very new to KiCAD (only heard of it some time ago) and just 
stumbled upon a
Youtube Video of 2017 FOSDEM (I believe?) where Wayne presented the 
current state of KiCAD.
As a result I had to see for myself and I am quite impressed of the 
development of KiCAD in the
last years! Very impressive.

I am a Researcher working in the areas of IC Design, (RF-) PCB Design 
and I am also a quite
realiable programmer (thats what I think anyway :-)). I am used to EAGLE 
CAD (from the oldern days)
and Altium Designer (ugh..). For IC Design we use Cadence Virtuoso.

Now, what really kicks me off with KiCAD is the (still very early) 
Python support. In my opinion, it is definitely
the right choice to pull some non-major functionality from the main 
KiCAD core and implement it into Python.
Why? Simply because that way it is much easier for people to modify, 
tweak, extend and bugfix the KiCAD software,
without having to study the KiCAD core. I want to be the living proof 
for this fact ;-)

I already have some ideas for pcbnew plugins. E.g. a Via-Fence Generator 
(select a line-segment in pcbnew, start
generator and enjoy the vias to the left and right of the line). There 
is similar functionality in Altium, but it
is very rudimentory and cannot be adjusted or tweaked very much. Also it 
is sometimes quite buggy resulting in non-ideal via
placement and due to this we usually place those vias (with GCPW 
transmission lines for example) by hand...
I think this would be a nice example of what non-proficient users could 
add to KiCAD without ever touching anything belonging
to the KiCAD C++ core application (where the latter would not fit into 
my available spare time due to its complexity, sorry!)

Anyway, what I wanted to ask before even starting with the development 
is the following. I know the current status of the
Python interface in pcbnew is very limited and "only" an interface 
generated by SWIG. So I guess there will be some
heavy adjustments in the API in the future (which is fine with me).

Is it planned in the future to make plugins part of the KiCAD 
distribution (i.e. ship them within the distro packages?)?
(Or do KiCAD users have to find a way for organizing a repository of 
KiCAD plugins?)
If yes, is the correct place to discuss their development (and request 
features) in this mailing list? Or should the forums
be used instead/at first?

I guess that is it for now. A big thanks to all the developers and 
especially the CERN folks. I put in a donation a few days ago :-)

Best Regards