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Re: Eeschema fields in Pcbnew (RFC)

 

Hi Justin,

I am not a developer but I use KiCad for production too. I would love to see the custom fields propagated from the schematic to the board design. It would make P&P programming easier. I maintain some special keywords in the schematic custom fields for our manufacturing process too. As a workaround I currently export the BOM from the schematic, the .pos file from the board design file. Then I use Google spreadsheets to combine the two and export again as a CSV file that can be imported into the P&P machine software.

It would be great to remove the additional indirection of a spreadsheet program and being able to export a rich .pos file. :)

Cheers,
Piotr


On 12/13/2017 05:56 PM, Justin Partain wrote:
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



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--
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Piotr Esden-Tempski
Founder, Embedded Systems Engineer
1 Bit Squared 'Professional Nano UAV Systems'
http://1bitsquared.com


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