Philip Pemberton wrote:
>    I'm toying with the idea of building a completely new set of 
> libraries for Kicad

That's the approach we've also chosen in the gta02-core project. Our
motivation for redoing things from scratch was that

- tracing back existing designs to their origins (vendor documentation
  or such) is very hard, probably takes more time than making a new
  footprint from a good source, and we might still miss some problems.

- most of our components have exotic footprints anyway

Instead of KiCad's module editor, we use a dedicated footprint editor
(fped) that captures more of the design process and allows for easier
review. Fped can directly output the KiCad module format.

All this is still work in progress but it's shaping up quite nicely.

A bit of documentation:
http://people.openmoko.org/werner/fped/gui.html

More documentation, with build instructions:
http://people.openmoko.org/werner/fped/README

Some of the things we've done with it so far:
http://people.openmoko.org/werner/gta02-core/gta02-core-modules.pdf

Note that our "flat" library wouldn't scale very well. You also have
to consider that different soldering processes and even different
board materials require different parameters. E.g., reflow vs. wave
vs. manual soldering.

- Werner

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