Which tutorials did you try? The Teho labs one got me going well enough. The yahoo groupmail is also very active and full of helpful people - including the developers sometimes. I can't compare KiCad with much as I didn't want to get bogged down with proprietary formats - so I persevered with learning KiCad. It is quirky, but seems quite powerful. The FreeRouter it links with can autoroute - but also good for dragging components around while maintaining netclass rules.
The Kicad-WinBuilder script has been updated, since some months it comes in a handy zip file with a bat file, just double click and everything starts. I guess the only other thing needed is cmake, but I'm not sure. Now, building you own testing versions is easier than ever
https://launchpad.net/kicad-winbuilder
Yes I do, In less than 2 days there's a new release, or Walter posts new libraries I upload a new package
its a bad sign
Why you say so?
I must admit sometimes it takes me more days to update them
but as he made them available via github, my packages are nearly useless
I wonder why it's even a requirement to build it for windows yourself? One big wrinkle in otherwise ok package... hopefully it's not there because people are lazy to make it more accessible?
I wonder why it's even a requirement to build it for windows yourself? One big wrinkle in otherwise ok package... hopefully it's not there because people are lazy to make it more accessible?
I dont think it's because they are lazy, it's probably the Linux/Geda origin of the project.
I must admit I can't get Bazaar to work properly with my Subversion so I don't build either.
But if you look up the thread a bit.
Latest testing build Rev.4448 with scripting, footprint library table and CERN's contributions is available at http://escalalibre.com/edwt/kicad_testingBinaries/ not sure if scripting works correctly as I don't know how to use it and/or test it.
That link has all the windows binaries and I think you can just drop them in and run them. Well it works for me anyway.
^ I will take that back
PCBNew doesn't work with the library table. I can't figure out why.
From what I can gather the library table is held in the users home directory. Except I haven't got this file, if I create it, it isn't used anyway.
I will go back to the last stable build for while.
Did you filled the lib table correctly? Here an example:
To be able to use those environment variables you may set them up on a bat file, which will be the new (temporary) way you run kicad:
Thanks for the help.
I can get the PCB library Tables as demonstrated but I cannot find the file(s). I would like to directly edit them. They are supposed to be in my "home" directory which in windows should be under \Users\, but I cannot find them.
Anyway they must be somewhere as the information remains after restarting Kicad.
I am using Windows 8.1 but for some reason I have no %HOME% Environment Variable, maybe this is a problem.
Anyway I will try loading the new pretties from github and see what happens.
Anyway different versions of Kicad seem to be playing happily together.
The file is here: C:\Users\<name>\AppData\Roaming\kicad\fp-lib-table and it's filled like this:
Excellent, it is there. Roaming, why wouldn't put it there???. Surprised that the indexed search didn't find it.
So anyway I downloaded a .pretty file and placed it on a PCB all good.
I am not sure whether to work live with Libraries or to manually update local copies of them.
I saw some scripts written to do this, when I get the chance I will try it out.
Thanks for the input.
i'll check if the same steps will solve my broken KICad on Linux. As soon as I switched to source builds the library thingy stopped working
Today (10-04-2014) I successfully built KiCad r4793 using Winbuilder on Windows 7.
Alexander.
To anyone building Kicad rev 4793 you will get this error when running cvpcb, eeschema, pcbnew, gerbview, pcbcalculator or pl_editor:
You need to manually copy:
"kicad-winbuilder-3.3\build\Release\cvpcb\_cvpcb.kiface"
"kicad-winbuilder-3.3\build\Release\eeschema\_eeschema.kiface"
"kicad-winbuilder-3.3\build\Release\gerbview\_gerbview.kiface"
"kicad-winbuilder-3.3\build\Release\pcb_calculator\_pcb_calculator.kiface"
"kicad-winbuilder-3.3\build\Release\pcbnew\_pcbnew.kiface"
"kicad-winbuilder-3.3\build\Release\pagelayout_editor\_pl_editor.kiface"
to your "kicad-winbuilder-3.3\kicad\bin\" folder
EDIT: cvpcb and pcbnew still fail to run
Can you check if _pcbnew.pyd exists?
Alexander.
The process completed successfully? No errors at all?
Alexander.
No errors, I'll try to rebuild from scratch.
After manually copying *.kiface files everything seems fine for me.
Alexander.
Nope, built from scratch and the problem persists