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External Tools

These are tools that KiCad users have made to aid in development of their projects either within or outside KiCad. The tools are not necessarily stictly cross platform.

altium2kicad

Sourcerer

Altium2kicad can help you migrate an Altium project to KiCad, it supports most features of .PcbDoc and .SchDoc, so it can convert both the PCB and schematic. It consists of a few perl scripts that are executed on the altium design files.

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eeshow

Werner Almesberger

Eeshow is a collection of programs that read schematics made by KiCad’s Eeschema. Eeshow can be used as interactive viewer, or as a command-line tool to convert schematics to PNG, PDF, Postscript, EPS, or FIG.

Eeshow can show the differences between two versions of schematics sheets and it can retrieve files directly from a git repository.

Eeshow was developed as part of the Neo900 project.

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fped

Werner Almesberger

Footprints tend to be highly repetitive, with many pads placed in a simple geometrical pattern. With fped, the user specifies the elements to repeat and the way they are repeated. Fped then generates the repetitions automatically.

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KiCad StepUp

easyw

KiCad StepUp is a FreeCAD Workbench aimed at helping both KiCad and FreeCAD users in collaborating with electrical (ECAD) and mechanical (MCAD) design.

Main features:

  • Load kicad board and parts in FreeCAD and export it to STEP (or IGES) models

  • Load kicad_mod footprint in FreeCAD to easy and precisely align the mechanical model to kicad footprint

  • Pull a pcb edge from a kicad_pcb board, edit it in FreeCAD Sketcher and push it back to kicad

  • Push & pull 3D models positions between FreeCAD and KiCAD

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KiCost

Dave Vandenbout (author), Hildo Guillardi Jr. (collaborator)

KiCost is intended to be run as a script for generating part-cost spreadsheets for circuit boards developed with KiCad. It works by scraping part distributor websites to get part pricing. Additionally, KiCost supports other bill of material files from other EDAs which is useful for older projects and it can even handle hand-made CSV files. KiCost also comes with a graphical user interface in addition to command line.

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