kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Piotr Esden-Tempski <piotr@xxxxxxxxx>]

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