kiskeleton 0.1.3

Derive and modify KiCad symbol libraries with spreadsheets

KiSkeleton 🩻

Derive and modify KiCad symbol libraries with spreadsheets

The problem

You have a large number of KiCad symbols with differing parameters derived from existing symbols.

You want a single source of truth for these that's easy to manage.

Example:

You have 100 different resistors, each with different values, datasheets, footprints, and manufacturer metadata.

Keeping a library of discrete symbols for each variation helps you place these and not sweat backfilling this metadata per project.

This is a task that is much easier to manage from a spreadsheet rather than creating every single part from scratch; after all, they're all the same base resistor symbol!

Installation

This project uses uv to manage stuff.

You can run it directly without installing with uvx:

uvx kiskeleton

Manual install

Clone this repo somewhere, then do:

uv tool install -e PATH_TO_CLONED_REPO

Now you can run it from wherever:

uv run kiskeleton

Usage

There's two phases to using the tool:

• Creating a new spreadsheet (possibly from an existing library/symbol)
• Generating a symbol library from the input spreadsheet

Creating a new spreadsheet

The new command helps you scaffold your spreadsheet. With no options provided, a blank spreadsheet with the minimum required fields is created.

You can also pass in the library and symbol options, which let you bootstrap it from a full existing library, or an existing symbol.

This example uses the default resistor symbol as an input:

kiskeleton new \
  --library /Applications/KiCad/KiCad.app/Contents/SharedSupport/symbols/Device.kicad_sym \
  --symbol R \
  --output my_cool_new_library.csv

This will generate the spreadsheet with a row pre-filled with the properties taken from the existing symbol.

You will now fill this out with all of your parts.

Generating from the spreadsheet

With the spreadsheet filled out, it's time to generate the symbol library:

kiskeleton generate \
  --input my_cool_new_library.csv \
  --output my_cool_new_library.kicad_sym

Required columns

The name, template_library, and template_symbol_name columns are required:

• name is the name of the symbol in the new library
• template_library is the library to pull our "template" symbol from
• template_symbol_name is the symbol within the library to base our new symbol off of

Any new properties that exist on the spreadsheet but not in the template symbol will be added and marked as hidden by default. If you wish to style/position these fields make sure they exist on your template symbols already (the value will be overwritten).