kipi 0.2.1

A tool for downloading and installing KiCad packages

KiPI

A tool for downloading and installing kiCad packages, primarily for KiCad v5.

Runs on Windows, should run on Linux (MacOs might also work).

Description

Currently supports footprints, symbols and templates. Configurations for KiCad official v5 libraries and templates, SparkFun, DigiKey and Walter Lain libraries.

Typically where available, point releases are downloaded as a zip file. Otherwise, latest versions of git repositories can be cloned locally.

This script can use git to:

1. Clone a repository if you don’t have it

2. Pull the latest repository if you already have it locally (does an update).

Content types:

• Footprints can be installed to fp-lib-table.

• Symbols can be installed to sym-lib-table.

• Templates are copied to ~/Documents/kicad/templates

• 3dmodels are copied to ${KISYS3DMOD}

• Scripts are copied to ${APPDATA}/kicad/scripting

Existing xx-lib-table will be saved to xx-lib-table-old.

Usage

kipi [options] <package spec> [<version>]

Package spec contains the packages to download/install. Version is a valid version from the package file or “latest”.

Options are:

-h, --help

shows a help screen on the command line

-v, --verbose

show verbose messages

-q, --quiet

don’t show logging

-t, --test

dry run, don’t perform actions

--config <local folder>

configure kipi. The local folder is the folder you want all your local data put in.

--download

download package data only

--install

install package data into KiCad (implies download)

--list

list installed packages

--remove

remove an installed package from KiCad

--update

update installed packages

Example Usage

kipi –config c:\kicad_data

kipi -v –install https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bobc/kicad-getlibs/master/packages/kicad-official-libraries-v5-no-3d.yml

Dependencies

• You need to have git installed to clone/update local git repositories.

Otherwise it should just run with a standard distribution of python 2.x, there are no special libraries used.

Bugs/Feature Requests

Please raise issue on github.

Credits

KiPI is derived from project https://github.com/hairymnstr/kicad-getlibs.

Content Types

Content type	Kicad v4	KiCad v5
footprint	Yes	Yes
symbol	No	Yes
3dmodel	Yes*	Yes*
template	Yes	Yes
script	No	Yes

Footprint

Footprints are installed in global fp-lib-table.

Symbol

• [v5] Symbols are installed in global sym-lib-table.

• [v4] Installing symbols is not supported because sym-lib-table is not supported in v4

3dmodel

3dmodels can be installed if KISYS3DMOD is a writable location by user and does not require admin permissions. On Windows the default path c:\program files... is not writable, so the user must re-configure KISYS3DMOD to writable location, e.g “C:\kicad_data\3dmodels”

Template

Templates are installed to user’s templates folder.

Script

Scripts may be pcbnew scripts or footprints wizards.

• [v5] Scripts are copied to global kicad/scripting folder.

• [v4] May work on Linux but does not work on Windows since v4 does not have a search path for user scripts.