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Comment by footoverhand | Hacker News Reader

Great article. It has been a few years since I last laid out a board in KiCad, the biggest thing I remember is that importing parts and footprints took a lot of work and it wasn't a very straight forward process.

Does anyone have a good workflow for managing and exporting parts so that people can go and download your cad files and libraries to reproduce your board?

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Have you checked out the KiCad library on github[1]? That library is installed with the install script that is included with KiCad I believe when you downloaded the bzr repo. The library maintainers seem to work pretty closely with the KiCad developers. I have started using KiCad for personal projects and have been following the KiCad development for about 6 months now and from what I have gathered there has been a lot of changes in the last year. I would definitely suggest giving it another try in the near future. It also seems that the way footprints and 3d models are handled has changed in the last year.

As for specific help for KiCad, they have a very helpful irc channel on freenode, there is a KiCad yahoo users group, and I just found this website with videos: KiCad.info

There hasn't been a stable release in a while but the developers seem to be serious about making a new stable release in the near future.

[1] https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-library

Chris Gammell of The Amp Hour is also getting http://kicad.info off the ground and there are some really great people providing advice in there.

I've gotten burned too many times using the built-in libraries (hidden pins in EESchema not being connected to PWR/GND / incorrect pin spacing in CvPCB) so I throw those together by hand now. In EESchema I would have done it anyway, just to get the pins arranged in a way that makes my drawing look purrrrty, but the drawing/verifying of footprints does get tedious.

My understanding is that some features were removed (or significantly modified) in subsequent releases of KiCad post the version I'm using (BZR 4022), specifically the BOM export, so I haven't bothered installing another version yet. I have a series of designs about to go into production so I'm leery to change up before those boards get committed for assembly.

This is the first time I have seen the KiCad library on github, that would presumably make sharing generated footprints and parts easier. For the board I produced of in 2011, I shared my library on sourceforge as a zip with no clear installation directions. I mostly learned KiCad from David Jones nice tutorial[1].

I'll check out KiCad in a few days to see how easy it is to share a design with someone else, to see with the latest version if library parts can be easily shared. Thanks for the links and helpful suggestions of consulting the IRC channel for support, I wouldn't have considered the IRC channel.

[1] http://www.alternatezone.com/electronics/files/PCBDesignTuto...

That's a brilliant document! Very thorough!

not exactly yet for import/export parts, but I feel the need for better online interactions with parts too. So, I started working on a small project to make this easier last weekend. First prototype: http://pinboardjs.divshot.io/ - what do you think? does this first sketch speak to you?

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