Plan with Libraries

From @lukabosnjakovic on Fri Jun 08 2018 11:34:21 GMT+0000 (UTC)

I know that LibrePCB is in high development stage but is there any plan for Libraries? Will they be imported from some other project or is plan that we will make it on our own? If we are doing them on our own maybe is good idea to open repo only for libs. And it would be wise to make some policy for accepting components others made

Copied from original issue: https://github.com/LibrePCB/librepcb-rfcs/issues/16

From @ouabache on Fri Jun 08 2018 16:57:45 GMT+0000 (UTC)

If LibrePCB succeeds then we can expect that libraries will develop the same way they did with kicad. We start by supplying some basic components and then continue to add to the official releases. Then other groups like Digikey and sparkfun will develop their own libs and make them available from the internet.

Having a tool that can convert a library from kicad ,eagle gEDA etc into LibrePCB would save a lot of time when importing other designs into LibrePCB.

John Eaton

@ubruhin: Hey, do you know if any work on Eagle library importer has been started? I may help in this area as I know the internal Eagle format pretty well.

There is already a simple Eagle to LibrePCB converter: https://github.com/LibrePCB/LibrePCB/tree/master/apps/EagleImport

It uses the library I have created for parsing Eagle files here: GitHub - LibrePCB/parseagle: C++/Qt library to parse Eagle XML files

The conversion works so far, but it’s not very useful to convert whole libraries because the concepts are very different between Eagle and LibrePCB, thus the quality of the resulting libraries is limited. The power of LibrePCB’s library concept is not really usable that way.

I think it would make much more sense if only graphical objects of symbols and footprints could be imported directly in our library editor. Then you have the power of LibrePCB’s library concept, but don’t have to draw symbols and footprints (which IMHO is the most time-consuming part of creating libraries).

Are you interested in integrating the Eagle import into the library editor? That would be really great :slight_smile:

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We have to be careful about the license though. Creating your own packages and symbols by importing Eagle libraries may be fine, but you won’t be able to contribute those to public libraries since we can’t publish Eagle shapes under Public Domain.

Is there any chance SnapEDA would be interested in supporting this? Anything they support doesn’t really need totally perfect lib import, because in a pinch one can usually find the part they need on their site.

You’d get a ton of extra traffic too.

They tend to export “Monolithic” libraries, files that have the footprint, package, etc all integrated together, without really making use of the fact that parts can come in different packages, so I suspect that it might not be too hard for them to add exporters.

Yes, that might be possible I think. You would then simply load those generated libraries as local libraries.