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Comment by myself248 | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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.

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

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