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.

For me there are 2 ways to get a simple CSV file out of a KiCad project:

It exports all the data from the netlist-file (*.net)
https://github.com/KarlZeilhofer/kicad2csvbom

26.2.2015
It seems, that this feature has been moved to pcbnew (File → Fabrication Outputs → BOM File). This feature exports a very similar format to that of my tool with the –compressed flag.

If you consider to improve the standard KiCad library with symbols, footprints or 3D models, please be sure to implement the rules in this document:
https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-library/blob/master/KiCad_Library_Convention.txt

There are many parts in the library, which do not implement this rules, but every new component has to fulfill these!

7.3.2015

Today I've written a simple tool for doing a rearrangement of multiple subsheets in an hierarchical schematic project. Since this feature isn't available in eeschema, this is now possible with this external tool written in with Qt.

It is published on GitHub

If you have places a footprint many times on a board, and then you want to change the footprint and update all instances in Kicad, you need a bit of workaround, sinc a dedicated command is not available.

1. Update the footprint in your library and save it.
2. Go back to your board, and press E over one of the instances to be changed.
3. Click „Change Footprint(s)“
4. Select „Change same footprint“
5. Hit OK