KiCAD 7 Build Environment
2 minute read
KiCAD 7 has some notable improvements, not lease among these is the addition of kicad-cli. Check out the Hackaday article for more.
I am a bit obsessed with pragmatic approaches to building and designing electronics. I want the complexity to not scale linearly in the number of projects I support. With shared design practices, reused sections, and update strategies log(n) complexity should be obtainable.
If every projects is set up in the same way then scripts can be used to do all manner of things that you didn’t expect to need to do before. This helps keep entropy buildup decreasing your productivity. Keeping a consistent directory structure keeps down the number of variables in a project. Using a makefile to ensure consistent naming, settings/options, and directory structures are used is a great help in this struggle against the flood of complexity that hardware projects bring.
Part of a good build strategy is versioning, I use semantic version numbering which allows a logical directory structure to develop in your version control software. This isn’t a requirement but I have found it useful.
I’m expecting to add to this makefile adding ‘bumpers’ helping ensure that all the files I need for a manufacturing run are up to date and correctly set up. All in the name of removing the possibility of entropy buildup and errors at the last stage of development. Getting boards in after 3 weeks that have 25 of the wrong component on each is not a good feeling.