29.9.2014

On my Kubuntu 14.04 I have installed KiCad with the shell-script, exactly the build #5054.
Kicad supports now footprints from EAGLE-Libraries. For simplicity I'm using the libraries from Walter Lain: http://smisioto.no-ip.org/elettronica/kicad/kicad-en.htm
I downloaded it with

git clone git://smisioto.eu/kicad_libs.git

and coppied them to

/home/karl/Karl/Elektronik/KiCad/walter_lain

.
To use this modules, I replaced the file named fp-lib-table in the home directory with the fp-lib-table file from Walter Lain. Further more the environment variable KISYSMOD has to be set. This I did by adding to the file

/etc/profile.d/kicad.sh

the line

export KISYSMOD=/home/karl/Karl/Elektronik/KiCad/walter_lain/kicad_libs/modules

. Don't forget to logout and log back in agian, before the variable can be used.

Some guys from CERN implemented some really fancy features:

• Highlight collisions: Shows traces in a different collor with violate design-rules with the new trace
• Shove: move other traces, which are in the way, when routing a new trace
• Walk around: find a possible way through the PCB without violating design-rules

Have a look at this tutorial video (10 minutes of length):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCG4daPvuVI

They have their own wiki-page here: http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki/Wiki

• CTRL + Click on pad –> highlight the net\\deselection needs also the CTRL-modifier
• SHIFT + Click on module –> add module to group-selection\\deselection with a click on the background

• Bugtracking on launchpad: https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad
• Demonstration of SketchUp input methods for drawing footprints. Perhaps this could someone implement in KiCad. I sent this video to the KiCad-development-team in CERN.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABFolmLW9uU

16.1.2015

After some retries, this version copmpiled without getting stuck in the middle of the whole process, which needs really some amount of time (felt like more then 1h, i didn't stop the time).

Option:

OPTS="$OPTS -DKICAD_USE_WEBKIT=OFF"

In version 3.0.0 are many bugs. e.g.

• hotkeys neded double press
• wrong focus of mouse wheel

Therefore I installed version 3.0.2, as described on the website of wxWidgets: http://codelite.org/LiteEditor/WxWidgets30Binaries#toc2

sudo apt-add-repository 'deb http://repos.codelite.org/wx3.0.2/ubuntu/ trusty universe'
sudo apt-get update
apt-get install libwxbase3.0-0-unofficial libwxbase3.0-dev libwxgtk3.0-0-unofficial libwxgtk3.0-dev wx3.0-headers wx-common libwxbase3.0-dbg libwxgtk3.0-dbg
kicad-install.sh --remove-sources
kicad-install.sh --install-or-update

The recompile needed 1 hour and 20 minutes, including downloading with an 5Mbit DSL line.

2015-01-28 For now, the export of a BOM is much too complicated. In my case, I installed KiCad with the PPA from js-reynaud. I cannot find any conversion scripts on my system in /usr/local/…
So I found a nice website, which does simply the conversion from XML to CSV! http://www.luxonsoftware.com/converter/xmltocsv

Has it to be that complicated? Am I the only KiCad user, which wants to have a BOM in libreoffice?