kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Mário Luzeiro <mrluzeiro@xxxxx>]

> 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.

I know my intervention may be a bit offtopic, but it may add some other elements to discussion:

On such case of the 3D variants, it could be considered a 3D parametric generation but KiCad would need to support it internally somehow.
Since a 3D file is only need at export time (eg: when user exports the project to STEP) or for 3D Viewer proposes ( generated on the fly ), there was no need to storage any 3D data for share a project as it will always be generated by KiCad.

Parametric / procedural generation is the easiest part:
https://github.com/KammutierSpule/kicad3Dmodels

Mario Luzeiro

________________________________________
From: Kicad-developers <kicad-developers-bounces+mrluzeiro=ua.pt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: 04 January 2019 14:03
To: kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Kicad-developers] [RFC] Symbol library file format

On 1/2/2019 2:55 PM, Vesa Solonen wrote:
> kristoffer Ödmark kirjoitti 2.1.2019 klo 12.32:
>
>> I would rather have a new atomic file-format or storage format, so one
>> could actually send a complete part in an easy way, that would include
>> 3D-Files, SPICE data, symbol and footprints, and it would also mean that
>> one could do the mapping to pins in that directory or file instead.

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.