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.

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.