kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Justin Partain <justinwpartain1@xxxxxxxxx>]

As a user, I do all my scripting outside of Kicad. From a developer's POV,
since Value/Reference fields are available to Python scripting, I can see
that these should be too. What do you think about a third tab in the module
edit dialogue, 'Fields', for these read-only fields?

How does everyone feel about changing the netlist format to export these
fields by default or with a checkbox? Would an alternative intermediate
file be preferred instead?

--

Justin Partain

On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 2:32 PM, Maciej Suminski <maciej.suminski@xxxxxxx>
wrote:

> Hi Justin,
>
> I also use an XML netlist and a python script to generate pick and place
> files. I agree it would be much better to have it done in one step, so
> you have my vote.
>
> Do you foresee any user interface to display the fields imported from
> netlist? I imagine the fields would be read-only for the time being,
> until we develop back annotation. Do you plan to make the fields
> available to Python scripts?
>
> Regards,
> Orson
>
> 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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