kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Justin Partain <justinwpartain1@xxxxxxxxx>]

I understand Kicad is in feature freeze and getting ready to release soon,
this is an RFC for a feature for Kicad 6.0 (or whatever is next).

Proposition: add the ability to import custom fields from Eeschema into
Pcbnew via the netlist

As a design engineer, I work closely with our production branch and the
ability to export xy-data with user-created fields (namely, internal part
number in our case) is a need. Currently, I'm looking at generating a .bom
file from Eeschema with the needed fields, generating .pos file from Pcbnew
per usual, and using a script to rip out the needed data from both and
reassemble in our desired format. This proposal covers getting the data
into Pcbnew, I'll probably send out another proposal for more customizable
XY-data output later. If this is approved, I'd rather Kicad support this
out of the box and I can maintain a branch until Kicad is ready to merge it.

This would require a .kicad_pcb format update and would not be backwards
compatible (unable to open new format in old Kicad). I'm imagining
key-value pairs like "(customfield $fieldname $fieldvalue)" for each
(module ...). There may be interest in being able to draw these to the
board, I'm not sure, maybe that could be added later if this gets approved.
--

Justin Partain