Hacker News Reader

Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

For small personal projects I have switched to LCSC in part because I can automate the BOM order when I generate the PCB gerbers all out of Kicad via gitlab pipeline. All I have to do is add the LCSC part numbers as an extra field in my Kicad schematic. If I order from JLCPCB I also get a shipping discount at LCSC.

Mauser and digitkey are very expensive to ship here (Switzerland) so unless my order is larger it's not worth it for small project that don't need any guarantee on where the part came from.

View on HN

It may not affect the economics of your situation, but if you do projects on a regular basis, this might help.

When I order parts for a project, my baseline rule is "order 3: one to break, one to use, one to kick around in your parts drawer for next time". Then I go back through my order and increase quantities of parts I know that I'll be needing again for future projects until the order total is high enough to qualify for discounts on shipping.

That's a good pro-tip, but the real pros order 10 of something they think will be useful in the future, and then let it sit in their parts collection for 80 years until they die.

> then let it sit in their parts collection for 80 years until they die.

Heh. I'm halfway there. I have parts in my bins that I bought 40 years ago. I even recently discovered I have an old 8085A microprocessor from the 80s left over from the first computer I built.

I'm baffled that Mouser and Digi-Key haven't put the same effort into a Kicad pluggin to replicate that capability.

I suspect that the KiCAD userbase is still considered "small potatoes" and not worthy of this kind of development effort.

Which is a shame if true. KiCAD is a gem of open source and holds a lot of mindshare with nerds and hackers.

Isn't Kicad the tool the CERN uses and also actively develops?

It is. Research and hobby does generally create lower order numbers than industry, though. However, at least DigiKey offers an integration iirc.

CERN is big enough that they probably use a bunch of different EDA tools. But yes, they do have people contributing KiCad.

You mean like this? https://github.com/Digi-Key/KiCad-Push-to-DigiKey

Digikey doesn't give a shit about interfacing with a hobbyist tool. There's no money in it. They'd much rather spend the resources on developing interfaces for their customers that spend 100-1000x more money with them.

Digikey has been pretty active on Twitter lately, targeting hobbyists. They're also a platinum level KiCAD sponsor. And they bought the kicad.org domain from a malware squatter and donated it to the KiCAD project.

They have several KiCAD specific items that they've spent resources creating.

https://github.com/Digi-Key/digikey-kicad-library

https://github.com/Digi-Key/digikey-partner-kicad-library

https://github.com/Digi-Key/KiCad-Push-to-DigiKey

How does that JLCPCB / LCSC shipping discount work? I know they used to do combined shipping but I think they dropped that option years ago.

I've been building some prototype boards for work with JLCPCB recently. There used to be an option to bundle parts from LCSC but that kind of went away. However, if you have a PCB order open you can get super cheap shipping if logged into the same account on LCSC.

I've been using JLCPCB's Global Sourcing service a lot recently. I can get DigiKey/Mouser parts sent to JLCPCB's inventory for assembly. The shipping is a bit slow but it beats having to manually assemble a few components not available at JLCPCB.

Care to share your GitLab pipeline? Are you using KiCad 7's new CLI interface?

I am using kicad 7 but with kibot. I will post the pipeline tomorrow here as another comment as I can't do it via mobile.

Edit: I will probably do a complete write up on my blog as I changed a few things between 6 and 7. Should be posting it within a week at https://sschueller.github.io/

When you post it, also submit it as a story on HN.

Here is my write up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35922207

Reply on news.ycombinator.com