IMO, KiCad is one of the best EDA tools out there, with just one major problem: Bill of Materials management is rough. If you make more than 1 board a year, you probably know how frustrating it can be to get everything together for an order. There are multiple ways to export a BOM (each with their own ups and downs), and the process of selecting and entering components is excruciatingly manual.
You can of course create custom components on a per MPN basis, but this can be time consuming and forces you to maintain a large number of individual component libraries.
The goal of this app is to ease the bom management burden on designers who choose to use Kicad for their layout and schematic capture needs, allowing for faster, easier data entry, and to provide a part database for re-use in future designs.
Requirements
- python 2.7
- sqlalchemy
- wxPython (pip install should work on most platforms, otherwise, see wxPython.org
Deprecated:
- kivy >= 1.9.0
- kivy garden
- navigationdrawer
garden install navigationdrawer
Features
Self-curated component database
Simply enter a part’s manufacturer, supplier, manufacturer PN, and supplier PN then click ‘save to datastore’. Information is keyed off of component value and footprint, so future uses can simply use the part lookup button to retrieve the information. Multiple suppliers, manufacturers, and part numbers are supported.
Like-Part consolidation
Everybody miskeys from time to time, this feature detects (to the best of its ability) components that are the same, but simply have mislabeled values. For example: (10K, 10k, 10 K) will be consolidated into a single value selectable by the user.
*Only components that share a footprint are consolidated.
CSV Bom Export
Exports PCBNew style component agregate BOMs as CSV. Suitable for upload to digikey/mouser/octopart/etc
KiCad Backpropagation
All changes can be saved back to KiCad Schematics
Read more: BOM/Component manager for KiCad
