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Comment by jan_Sate | Hacker News Reader

The main limitation I've encountered with KiCad is its component library ootb. Anyway those can often be downloaded from third party websites.

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That's not really a limitation for professionals, though.

Built-in component libraries are always going to be incomplete, and literally all of them kinda suck. Professional PCB designers almost always have to either create their own footprints from the datasheet, or get them from someone else who did. Trusting third-party footprints is probably the easiest way to end up with fundamentally broken prototypes which are nothing more than fancy desk decorations - I can unfortunately speak from experience.

The built-in libraries are basically only used for trivial things like resistor footprints, 2.54mm headers, or solder jumpers. KiCad's libraries are more than good enough for that.

Footprints are less of an issue than schematic library. If you need to say tailor-make QFP-48 footprint that might be some work but you will likely reuse it for multiple parts.

Until you find out that a manufacturer decided to use a footprint which looks standard, but uses a custom pin numbering. The schematic symbols are right and so are the KiCad-provided footprints, but they are still not going to work together.

But yeah, a lot of chip footprints are quite standard, or require only small modifications from those standard footprints. I do still have to hand-draw quite a few of them, but that's because my designs are usually quite heavy on relatively obscure peripherals.

While I agree with crote's reply that this isn't a limitation at all for a professional, I'm surprised to hear your opinion. Of all the libraries that come with tools, I find KiCad's to be the highest quality with regard to footprints (in addition to having a ton of them available). Perhaps the symbol libraries are more limited, but that being said, I've never found a mistake in KiCad's library. I've definitely found mistakes in the built-in Altium libs. To be fair, Altium started getting much better after their acquisition of Octopart, and it started to be easier to find things through the built-in search.

As a professional that lays outs boards about twice a year…

I have never understood the concern about the built in library. Professionals barely use it. You MIGHT use it for some SMDs, but that’s about it. Everything else you are going to get or make or download the specific footprint.

I agree with the parent comments. You will spend an absurd amount of time making library components, and you can't trust 3rd party. The 3rd party sites are a great starting point to take out some of the grunt work, but you need to tweak them.

Your (cad tool) component library is your most valuable resource, and in my opinion more valuable than schematics/layouts. You have your own proven set of components that you know will work in manufacturing. Even the standard passive SMD footprints need to be tweaked for your specific requirements (ISO, design for manufacturing etc).

In regards to Kicad... great tool for 90% of designs. I would say as a rule of thumb, if your design can be manufactured at one of those online, cheap PCB manufacturers (for say, $10-$20) then Kicad will cover it. Once that calculator tool starts going higher you're probably doing someone more complicated that warrants the more expensive tools.

It's not a limitation at all. There are no PCB design programs that have every part ever manufactured in the library. At some point you're going to have to make a PCB footprint yourself no matter what software you use. Pretty much all datasheets have explicit measurements of the footprint layout. Even better if you have the physical part and some calipers.

Has there ever been an attempt at a good standardized machine-readable exchange format for datasheets in general, btw? Feels to me like it still all comes down to authoring tools for making pretty PDFs, and while there's something to be said for the universality of a good ol' paper-style doc made for human eyeballs, but it's also silly (not to mention error-prone) for Engineer A to use a SW package to make a schematic for a datasheet PDF, and Engineer B then reading it and inputting it back into a SW package.

I assume many vendors also offer parts libs/files in EDA formats, but are those proprietary or is there any de-facto standard like Gerber files?

It'd also be nice to browse datasheets' other contents in a consistent interface right in the EDA or in a web app instead of dealing with a zoo of PDFs in vendor-specific styles.

Maybe it's this kind of thing we'll automate using LLMs/models ... give it a description of the scripting API of the EDA, give it the PDF, make it map a footprint from one to the other. Or to a standard format. For back catalogs that could be useful ...

>I assume many vendors also offer parts libs/files in EDA formats, but are those proprietary or is there any de-facto standard like Gerber files?

It would be great if part manufacturers would just make the footprint files and 3D files available for the parts, because I have no doubt that in 99% of cases the manufacturer has those files somewhere. I've tried to social engineer this out of some companies with very little success. I don't care what format they come in, I'll get it sorted out. I have collected an arsenal of file format conversion tools.

>Maybe it's this kind of thing we'll automate using LLMs/models

I have no doubt that at some point in the future you'll just give the AI the PDF and it will spit out a PCB footprint in any file format you want. We're not close to that though.

> I've tried to social engineer this out of some companies with very little success.

Maybe part of the inertia is that it pays too many people's meals, since you can buy this as a service ...

https://resources.sw.siemens.com/en-US/technology-overview-p...

Making symbols and the occasional footprint is a fact of life, I'm afraid. Sometimes you can download them from the vendor, or in a pinch, SnapEDA, but chances are you'll want to modify them anyway.

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