kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Ingo Kletti <ikletti@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'll throw in my weight as my job is supporting students working on 
their assigntments in electronics engineering (40-50 students per 
semester) and for many their first contact with EDA software is KiCad.

I've created a small atomic library representing the parts we have 
readily available but the majority of parts are special to the task at 
hand and need to be sourced from Digikey, Mouser et al.

We could impose a policy about additional fields, but from experience 
I'd say that we would have to reject about half of the projects.

So if the fields like Manufacturer Part Number or Vendor were 
pre-defined, this would give first-time users like our students a much 
better idea about the usefulness of the fields without me and my 
colleagues explaining the same thing over and over.

In addition external tools and plugins would finally know what terms to 
look for and work without the need for fine-tuning for keywords before 
being useful.

And for the argument of "part number must be unique and Manufacturer and 
Vendor must be handled by the company database":

This is complete overkill for one-off project like the ones our students 
work on, but nevertheless we need a way to enable external tools for 
handling the component sourcing.

I guess this is also true for a big but silent part of the Kicad user base.

Regards,

Ingo