For a long time, I haven't been too happy with KiCad's module editor. While it eventually does get the job done, I feel it relies overly on manual work. With computers, we should be able to do better :-)
In the context of the gta02-core project, which depends heavily on peer review, two more problems became apparent: - the module editor doesn't capture the construction steps that led to the positions of things - it's hard to review the results of one's work So I hacked a little footprint editor called fped that tries to get this right. Its purpose is to explore the parametric design approach and also to help us make the footprints for gta02-core. The README with build instructions, etc., is here: http://svn.openmoko.org/trunk/eda/fped/README You can design a footprint in two ways: either by writing a definition in the human-readable language fped processes, or by drawing things via the GUI. You can also combine the two, but be warned that fped strips all comments when saving a design. A fully developed example made through the GUI is here: http://svn.openmoko.org/trunk/eda/fped/sc89.fpd And this is a partial QFN that serves as my playground for experimenting with the language: http://svn.openmoko.org/trunk/eda/fped/qfn.fpd Fped writes the KiCad module format and it also has some rudimentary Postscript output. Fped is still under construction and has a few severe limitations: - you can't define holes, not even mechanical ones - pads always affect component, solder mask, and solder paste layer. There's no way to specify a solder paste that doesn't cover the entire pad. - it's easy to generate footprints with multiple identical pads and fped won't even notice And there's a lot of minor issues as well. Of course it's also still fairly crash-happy and the code organization sucks. - Werner
