kicad-lib-committers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, May 17, 2014 at 06:03:42PM +0200, Kerusey Karyu wrote:

> Sorry, but creating multiple footprints is creating a mess. Creating
> multiple symbols is an element that attracts (future) users. Many of them
> evaluates the quality of the EDA software by the number of elements in the
> libraries, especially symbols.

Uhm. Really I don't get the difference... if creating multiple
footprints is a mess why creating more symbols would not? I really don't
care a lot about this :D

For one thing you have a point however: symbols are *not* technology
dependant, so there is one less degree of combinatorial explosion to
care about.

So you would have: the NPN (in 123 form), PNP (123), MOS, JFET and so
on. But on the pcb size the SOT23 (or whatever) in 0.2mm tech, 0.15mm
tech and 0.1mm tech.

I'd say that these days (where pinning for discretes is almost fixed)
you could save a lot of footprints in this way.

> KiCad libraries is a one of weak points of the whole suite. IMHO if We beat
> EAGLE in that point this will be a strong turning point for the whole
> package (at least in my country).

I don't know. Since old OrCADs (*very* old) I always had to define my
symbols for many things and, considering the whole time spent on
a design, the symbol design (or the footprint design) time is quite
small.

Good routing facilities are what separate a good cad from another one.
Both automatic (if available) and manual routing. Then of course you can
offer specific aids for particular designs (like impedance control or
cross-netclass rules and so on). In my experience the schematic capture
is only used for about 10-20% of the whole work, the rest of the time is
spent doing the layout. YMMV of course...

That is, unless you target small designs and hobbists (nothing wrong
with targeting them, of course) in which case the 'stock' library is
quite important.

Be careful comparing library sizes: eagle (and probably many other
commercial program) still ship with obsolete parts in the library; how
many people would actually use a DIP packaged original Z80 (with its
companion entourage)? Maybe someone restricted to a MILSPEC catalog of
certified parts... eeschema is not immune to this, there are some 74xx
parts which are not even manufactured anymore or deprecated anyway.

Someone comparing the library sizes would be mislead by a lot of (not
useful) parts...

OTOH kicad is missing the very useful and current families like
littlelogic or silicon dust (single gate 74xx component in SOT packages,
for reference). These are de-facto part of the 74 function number
listing (look for a G in the name, usually)

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
Logos Srl