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Electronics => PCB/EDA/CAD => KiCad => Topic started by: FloridaMan on July 24, 2020, 03:21:31 pm

Title: Some KiCad scripts I wrote
Post by: FloridaMan on July 24, 2020, 03:21:31 pm

First new topic here. Second post. I'm a bit of a Luddite when it comes to the state of things with PCB design and someone suggested that I post here on your forum some of the things that I've written. I had been running a commercial version of Eagle 4.16r2, but when I went to renew, I found that Autodesk wanted me to subscribe to a cloud-based subscription model. And well, they can go piss up a rope. EAGLE was only good enough to keep me from writing my own product.

Anyhoo, I did much of my EAGLE stuff from the keyboard and wrote add-ins to allow for automated PCB design and have gone down that path again for KiCad. I'm no KiCad expert, and I know there are correct ways of writing extensions for KiCad that add toolbar buttons and such, but I just wanted to be able to align components easily on my boards, or put a pinout table on my silk screen. I've also developed tools for declarative schematic, symbol and package designs as well that I haven't added to my github repo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEAfJ28Wvd8 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEAfJ28Wvd8)

Title: Re: Some KiCad scripts I wrote
Post by: poeschlr on July 25, 2020, 01:35:46 am

KiCad already has alignment (and distribution) features build in:
 select the things you want to align, right click -> align/distribute and choose your alignment or distribution option (The last thing you selected will be used as the reference for alignment. For distribution the "extreme" positions will be used as the references).