KiBot VS kicad-plugins

My CICD is done with KiBot - https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot and my pipeline templates are https://github.com/gcormier/kicad-jobs

Not exactly the same you suggested, but many of those points are already covered by KiBot. You might want to take a look at it: Kibot

One of the features that peaked my interest with the release of 7.0 was kicad-cli. I've wanted a built in tool for CI/CD for a while. I know there is Kibot but to be honest, I found the base configuration a little overwhelming and also struggled to get it running locally on a macOS setup - without tainting system Python.

KiBot [0] is super handy for this, the documentation has an explicit section on CI/CD usage.

It's a bit clunky (not KiBots fault at all, it has to basically script drive the GUI to achieve some functionality which has now been added to the kicad cli) so hopefully going forward CI/CD with KiCad will be even easier!

0: https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot

I'm using KiBot for this, see pcb_replace/sch_replace options here: https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot#supported-preflight-optio...

I've been bitten by the DRC before, but KiBot[0] renders that moot. I have it running as a pre-commit hook, and it generates my Gerbers and everything. That way, all this stuff is automated and I can't make a mistake.

Check out my project's config:

https://gitlab.com/stavros/esp32-cnc/-/blob/master/project.k...

[0]: https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot#introduction

This mainly uses the KiBot action (https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot)

I am a total amateur here. But I found it natural to keep a relative spacial coherence in the schematic, and have it somewhat similar on the PCB side.

Though kicad would just dump everything randomly when moving to thr PCB view. As I understand, "packing" should help keeping this spacial grouping.

There is a plugin though[1] that does place the components on the PCB similar as they are placed on the schematic (and this does work with sub-sheet too). This is tremendously helpful starting point.

[1] https://github.com/ian-ross/kicad-plugins

Alternative, the plugin SchematicPositionsToLayout.py attempts to group components on the PCB by the schematic. (I haven't used this one yet, but it looks promising.)

There's also a schematic position to PCB position plugin which does a good job of faking it, although whether it'll work nicely with that many components is debatable.