[kicad-users] Create module from gerber files
Hi, I need a LLP32 footprint from National and found the gerber on their website: http://www.national.com/analog/packaging/gerber Is there any way I can create a module from these? I tried to use gerbview, import the layers but all I can do is export to pcbnew and even that doesn't work well, as all rectangles are rounded as if the resolution was much lowered. Thanks, David
Re: [kicad-users] uploading a new library on kicad library site
Hello, I think it would be nice to have some kind of guidelines and good practices for creating Kicad Libraries. I only created a few components so far but it would be great if everybody could help increasing the available libraries. And to have some consistency, it would be necessary to have guidelines. A small tutorial could also be great to help newbies create components to right way and tell them how to share them. I would be glad to be able to contribute if I can have a way to control the quality of my library before submitting it. Things I wondered about are naming conventions, how to organize pins (mapping of the chip or grouping in a way that make more sense), what about the power pins, ... If someone is interested in this, I can do a list of all the questions I had, that can be a good start for creating guidelines. To ease contribution, can't we put all libraries on SVN, either the official kicad SVN or another one? I think there's already such a project started on sourceforge but without much contributions. There could be a submit section where everybody would have write access, then maintainers could push them in an official branch once they're sure they meet the guidelines. Well, that's a bit more complex than what I described but the main idea is to make it easy for anybody to contrinute by adding or improving components. David Bourgeois
Re: [kicad-users] Kicad or another tool
Hi Chris, I'm not a Mac but I've seen a couple of messages about compiling Kicad on Mac lately, probably on the developer mailing list. You should have a look at the archives. From what I remember, there have been some work done to improve compiling on Mac OS but there are some issues with wxwidgets 2.8. You may have to use 2.6. David On Sat, 24 Nov 2007 04:47:58 +0100, chris_inacio [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello all, I'm looking for some advice on choosing a PCB tool. I am new to PCB design. I've done FPGA RTL and embedded RTOS, and such professionally, but I've never done my own PCB's. I like what I can see with Kicad, but I will be using Mac OS X as my operating system. I've gotten it to compile on Mac OS X, but it is clumsy at this point. (That's probably being a little generous too.) There doesn't seem to be a lot of Mac OS X support. It looks like the last post about a Mac OS X port was in August. My first question, is there any actual interest in a Mac OS X port? I can probably help make it better; but I don't want to spend all my free time improving the tools, and not doing any PCB design. Second, there are a handful of alternatives for Mac OS. Osmond PCB, EAGLE, McCAD, PCBWarrior, Elektro CAD. Does anyone have any opinions of these alternatives? I'm not trying to troll for trouble here -- just some honest feedback. For just about every tool I've ever used for this type of stuff (and embedded debug, etc.) investing time into learning the tool is a lot of investment, I don't want to waste my effort if I can avoid it. I don't mind pitching in some to a Kicad to Mac OS X port, but like I said, I also want to get other stuff done. And if it matters, I'm looking at designing some moderately complex boards. Some mixed signal, ARM + FPGA + ethernet + wifi. ARM + FPGA + GPS module + radio modem. So I'm sure I will be digging into Johnson's Black Magic to help me along the way. I doubt there is any kind of open source equivalent to Hyperlinx or Maxwell? Would this type of board design impact my tool choice? (And yes, I do have some very experienced board design friends to help me out, but I would like to do it mostly on my own.) Thanks, Chris Inacio Please read the Kicad FAQ in the group files section before posting your question. Please post your bug reports here. They will be picked up by the creator of Kicad. Please visit http://www.kicadlib.org for details of how to contribute your symbols/modules to the kicad library. For building Kicad from source and other development questions visit the kicad-devel group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-devel Yahoo! Groups Links
Re: [kicad-users] Re: Creating an interface to FreeRouting
We need to explore the work order or bounty idea further. Maybe a little out of the box thinking is required. Website automation would help, but tell me if this is easy or not: 1) Discussion is done on this list to create a work order, usually an enhancement. 2) Someone posts the work order on a website built to support this new business model. 3) Developer(s) bid on the work order, with each bid listed seperately. Now you have one work order with multiple bids attached to it. 4) Users can tentatively commit with credit card to funding any or all of the bids. The credit cards are not billed until the trip point for any of the bids are reached. The trip point is when enough tentative commitments have been submitted. Only the first bid to be tripped fires the credit card billing. At that point the other bids are dead, and their tentative commitments are voided. On the bid that tripped, maybe a partial payment of the funds go to the developer, with balance of the funds held in escrow until the work is completed. Would not a mechanism like this turbo charge the Kicad project? Maybe within 5 years this could be the best software in the world. Within 1 year you'd have no reason to use any other software. It is capitalism, without the middle man: the software company. Yes you can find holes in the idea, but it is a starting point and demands refinement. Hi Dick, I completely agree with the idea that it would be nice to sponsor the developers to move the project formward. I would myself contribute a small amount to keep the current developers doing their job. I'm only doing small hobby projects but Kicad is a great solution for publishing open-source hardware projects. But if some companies are now using it, I guess they would be able to contrinute much more to the project as that will save them those expensive commercial CAD packages. Googling a bit around, I found that bounties usually lead to community disorders (http://www.openlogic.com/blogs/2007/07/guadec-keynote-would-you-do-it-again-for-free/). Now we need to take into account that kicad has few active developers and that they're very commited to the project. I'm sure they're ways to get what we want: get the project moving. I found 2 links for funding services that may help, I have no experience with them though: http://micropledge.com/ http://www.opensourcexperts.com/ David
Re: [kicad-users] Re: using subfolders for extra libraries
Thanks for fixing that issue Jean-Pierre! It works now (btw the svn notification list is great :-) ) On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:54:06 +0100, Robert [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That field is completely empty - I've never entered anything into it. Just out of curiosity, what is it intended to be used for? A default directory for then you hit the Add button? It seems that the default path is stripped from the library file path when a new library is added, so if you move the libraries and change the path, it should still work. But if a library is outside the default path, it's full path is kept and the default path isn't used. David
Re: [kicad-users] using subfolders for extra libraries
On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 09:51:13 +0100, David Cleare [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I must be missing something obvious here... How can I add libraries and modules that are in subfolders of the main /kicad/library and /kicad/modules folders? When I browse to them in Libs and Dir, I can add, but when I close the window the error Library ... not found.. It even happens when I specifiy the full path. I'm using the Win32 version of KiCad. sorry if this is too obvious, did you try save cfg. I haven't tried your exact thing your are doing, but it works for folders elsewhere.. dc I have the same problem under Linux, Actually the error shows up when saving the configuration file. David Bourgeois
Re: [kicad-users] Re: using subfolders for extra libraries
On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 10:18:20 +0100, Harold King Tarun [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Have you tried using the latest version of Kicad? because in my system both Win32 and Linux I can add new library (file), save configuration file and even stays there when I close and re-open the project. I'm not encountering any error so far. Yes, I'm using kicad from SVN. What I tried is to add libraries that are not in the 'Libary files path, so add libraries from /libs and from /libs/category1. I can add them but when closing the dialog, I get an error that the libaries that are not in the path (from category1) were not found. This sounds normal as it's only possible to set a single path for libraries, and it seems not to be recursive. I guess all libarries should simply be located in the same folder. David
Re: [kicad-users] Re: Unused pins
On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 10:05:01 +0100, Harold King Tarun [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi David, I suggest you use a No Connect Flag to those un-used pins. This will not generate any error when you run DRC (PCB) or ERC (SCH). Thanks Harold. I'm using the 'no connect flag' on regular pins that I don't want to connect in my design. But those NC pins aren't even connected to the chip in the IC package so ideally we shouldn't have to flag them on each placement. Either they should be flagged in libedit and not drawn, or they shouldn't be placed at all. I'm not looking for a workaround, just trying to grasp kicad's way of doing things. I understand what you mean, you can create your own schematic library using the library editor to create your own set or customized component but be sure to place a footprint to link your component to PCB. I looked up a few components in the default libraries of kicad and didn't find any component which had its footprint field defined. You can still link your footprint in CVPCB though I think it would be more appropriate at least for IC's to have the footprints defined in libedit. In my case, how can I define 3 footprints for the CP2515? I need 18-Lead PDIP (300 mil), 18-Lead SOIC (300 mil) and 20-Lead TSSOP (4.4 mm). Can I add multiple footprints in the footprint field or do I need to use filters? Thanks for your help, David
Re: [kicad-users] Re: using subfolders for extra libraries
On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 11:58:15 +0100, Robert [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have libraries in two separate directories, on different drives (representing the those supplied with kicad and my own). I had no difficulties doing this. I used Preferences...Libs and Dir from the menu, then clicked Add to add the library, and Save Cfg to save the new configuration. Does that not work for you? Hi Robert, it doesn't work for me if I do exactly that. Which directory do you set in the 'Library Files path' field? David
[kicad-users] Gentoo live ebuild
Hi, I create a live ebuild for compiling and installing kicad from SVN head under Gentoo linux. Its now as simple as typing 'emerge kicad-live' to get kicad updated to the latest svn revision. You can grab the ebuild at http://svn.engelkotzen.net/public/live-ebuilds/sci-electronics/kicad-live/kicad-live-0.1.ebuild and copy it into your overlay. Please let me know of any problem you may encounter. Alternatively, I added this ebuild to the live-ebuilds overlay so it's possible to get it from layman. Here are the instructions. To use the overlay you need to emerge layman and add the overlay: emerge -va layman echo source /usr/portage/local/layman/make.conf /etc/make.conf layman -f -a live-ebuilds You can then install kicad with emerge -va kicad-live If a version of kicad was already installed, you will have to unmerge it before you'll be able to install kicad-live: emerge -C kicad Finally, it might be useful to update the overlay from time to time in case the ebuild changes: layman -S HTH and thanks to the active contributors that constantly improve kicad. David Please read the Kicad FAQ in the group files section before posting your question. Please post your bug reports here. They will be picked up by the creator of Kicad. Please visit http://www.kicadlib.org for details of how to contribute your symbols/modules to the kicad library. For building Kicad from source and other development questions visit the kicad-devel group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-devel Yahoo! Groups Links * To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-users/ * Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional * To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kicad-users/join (Yahoo! ID required) * To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/