Re:FindChips – Get instant insight into any electronic compo...
by marcosdumay on Friday February 08, 2019 @06:13AM
(#19113178)
For a long while geda's pcb used mostly parametrized footprints written in M4. People mostly hated them.
If one is wandering into that path, the hardest problem to solve is defining a good language/library in what people can describe them.
A lot of good stuff has begun to happen in this regard. At least KiCad has a large and pretty decent quality collection of footprints; I think other tools are making similar efforts.
However, I wish they would make it easy to adjust these footprints or make derivatives of them, without having to essentially redraw them.
For a looong time I’ve wanted to apply geometric constraint solving to drawing footprints. This would allow for having a base footprint which defines the constraints and then parameter files could introduce the specific dimensions needed. I’ve been working on it at https://github.com/henrikh/footwork-ecad and the parts are there, but I’d love to collaborate on it with someone :-)