← Back to team overview

kicad-developers team mailing list archive

Re: [RFC] Symbol library file format

 

On 2019-01-04 15:03, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:

I can somewhat see the utility in this but it really doesn't make a lot
of sense to me.  Lets assume for a second that it would be useful to
create a separate atomic part for every 0603 resistor part number
currently available.  Given that the 0603 footprint file is 1.7K, the
step 3D model is 39.6K, the wrl 3D model is 14.4K, and the fully defined
symbol file would be about 1.5K so that's a total of 57.2K per atomic
part number.  Now if you create a unique part number for every
resistance value, tolerance, temperature coefficient, manufacturer, etc.
that would be tens if not hundreds of thousands of unique part numbers.
  100K unique atomic part numbers would require 5.72G of storage just for
the 0603 resistors.  Add all of the other resistors footprints including
THT and your talking about several 100G.  Add all of the other passive
components like capacitors, inductors, etc and you are talking about
several terabytes of storage.  Maybe I'm missing something but even with
modern storage systems, this doesn't scale well.

I agree totally, But today basically we treat the symbol as the ultimate storage unit for these things, so if one were so inclined, it would mean a lot of symbols instead.

Basically I just want the symbol to be the graphics to eeschema, and a higher level part unit keeping the relation of eeschema-graphics, pcbnew-graphics, metadata and documents information.

I am not advocating the need to generate parts for every resistor out there. Just that maybe we should allow the possibility for me to instead of sending a pdf, a footprint, a symbol, a 3d file, store them in different specific places to match what is written in the symbol file.

Just allow a part to define all of these in one file, or with relative paths with regards to the part file, for easier transfer to partners or similar.



Follow ups

References