Help with Kicad footprints (current version)

[Damian Mitchell]

Hi...

I'm getting quite frustrated with Kicad!!!

Has anyone been through this, and can point me in the right direction?

I've made a few PCB's with the standard libraries, but I'm now trying to make my own footprint library, for components I commonly use...

At the moment, Just::-

1) Normal 0.25W resistor, standing up
2) Signal Diode 5.08mm pitch
3) Standard Potentiometer (library part has huge holes)
4) Multi footprint small Capacitor (3 holes, 2 connected together)

I'm using the version which generates .pretty files (all the help on youtube e.t.c. is for the older version where .mod files are used).

I can draw a footprint, but I need to save to a directory (which it then renames .pretty) as opposed to putting the files in the directory selected. It then seems to save all the footprints of the library I was using last in that .pretty folder as .mod files, excluding the footprint I was working on!

I was hoping to keep my commonly used footprints in a place where all PCB's I work on could access (e.g. in the kicad equivalent of the DOS path statement), on dropbox / owncloud / network share...

This is nice software, but stuff like this makes me think the developers thought "what is the most difficult and non logical way we could do this", and then when writing the documentation, lets write something which explains the situation that no-one would do (overwriting the default libraries), and forget about the situation that most people would want to do...

Sorry Rant over, I needed to vent...

Anyway, has anyone gone through this learning curve?

 

[Damian Mitchell]

Exiting the App... "Do you want to save this Footprint" - Yeah why not...

Then I get a permissions error it's trying to save to Github!!!

why! I just want to save to the folder I selected 5 minutes ago!!!



Going to bed now

 

[Colin Mitchell]

Kicad I found to be full of bugs to the extent of uselessness. I deleted it when I found myself fighting the software rather than designing a PCB.

 

[Minder]

I am using the older stable build ver 2013-07-07 and it works Very well for me, I have found it has replaced the older expensive ver of Orcad I was using.
There is a bit of a learning curve, but there are plenty of tutorials Utube and elsewhere.
M.

 

[Damian Mitchell]

This pretty sums up my experience...

Which is a real shame, as pretty much everything else in the program works nicely...