(I think this means I can’t edit any of my 7.0 projects now until the Ubuntu 7.0 package is released, since 6.0 won’t open them, and they’ll become 7.99 projects which 7.0 won’t be able to open if I edit them with 7.99.)
@doctroid@synthdiy strictly speaking the file format has not changed yet in v7.99, so it won’t cause any issues yet, but I can’t speak to when that will change.
The 7 update was a good opportunity to entirely nuke all my previous installs and settings and redo them from scratch now that i have a bit of a clue what i’m doing
Enter one command to churn out all sorts of documentation for a project — schematic PDF, PCB layouts, STEP model, interactive and static BOMs, as well as Gerbers.
Fairly nice as it is but I’m working on improvements to make it faster and more flexible. (Early days, where by “days” I mean “day”, but you can take a look here: GitHub - holmesrichards/kicad_7_cli_doc_gen at rsh)
I’ve been banging on this for three days now and I think it’s in pretty good form. New URL:
Big changes from the original are:
It processes all KiCad projects under a main project directory (e.g. a PCB and a panel?) rather than just one
It uses multiple levels of configuration files to control its behavior on anything from a global to a single KiCad project basis
It doesn’t regenerate any files that are already newer than the KiCad files they derive from
It leverages KiKit to offer separate documentation and Gerber files for individual PCBs in a multi-PCB KiCad design (and KiKit can be used instead of kicad-cli, if preferred, for Gerber generation)
I’m still finding bugs but it’s generally doing what I want it to and I’m confident using it on my actual projects (then again I do run hourly backups). Check it out.
KiCad 7.0.6 is here and there are a couple of changes to kicad-cli which prompted an update to kdocgen. The more boring one (I think) is that you can now specify either KiCad or Protel extensions for Gerber export. The one I’m more enthusiastic about is that, now that --mirrored is an option for kicad-cli pdf export pdf, kdocgen takes separate lists of front and back layers and mirrors the PDF export for the back layers (so they come out looking like the back of the PCB viewed from the back, rather than the back viewed from the front). Also, the edge layer is by default included in each layer’s PDF output. This does mean any existing config files that specify layers for pcb_pdf will need to be updated for this version.
