kipi 0.1.1

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 file> [<version>]

Package file 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

Shows the verbose messages

-q, --quiet

Don’t show logging

-c, --config <local folder>

Configure get-libs. The local folder is the folder you want all your local data put in.

-d, --download

Download package data only

-i, --install

Install package data into KiCad (implies download)

-u, --uninstall

Uninstall package data from KiCad

Example Usage

kipi -c c:\kicad_data

kipi -vi kicad-official-libraries-v5.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
footprints	Yes	Yes
symbols	No	Yes
3dmodels	Yes*	Yes*
templates	Yes	Yes
scripts	No	Yes

Footprints

Footprints are installed in global fp-lib-table.

Symbols

[v5] Symbols are installed in global sym-lib-table. [v4] Installing symbols is not supported because sym-lib-table is not supported in v4

3dmodels

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_data3dmodels”

Templates

Templates are installed to user’s templates folder.

Scripts

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.