KiBot VS skidl

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)

Great question! We hope we have a few good reasons.

This iteration of the project actually came after first working with and then modifying another awesome project called SKiDL (https://github.com/devbisme/skidl).

It's based on Python - but we found that because since it's procedural, turing complete and has a rich eco-system - people use to that and there aren't standard composable ways of designing things. Instead of describing your board, you (practically) write a script that generates your board. It entangles your targets with your source-code and can make it difficult to understand the ultimate outcome of what you've written.

Additionally, since it's a potentially very long program, it was hard to write good language support around (a language server for VSCode, a schematic visualiser etc...) that were snappy, responsive and lent to examining modules as well as the whole program.

There's a few operators and first-class language features we wanted as well, like units and tolerances (3.3V +/- 100mV) that just aren't the same when embedded in a string, or class init method.

there is skidl for schematics, but yeah shit was hand drawn before GUIs.

Further, there are many python libraries etc which can be used to design electrical circuits using code: https://github.com/devbisme/skidl

I'd like to see documentation on your workflow. You can also post it on https://github.com/devbisme/skidl/discussions.

There is a generate_pcb() function in SKiDL that will output a kicad_pcb file that can be directly opened using PCBNEW (no need to generate the intermediate netlist file). That function uses HierPlace to group the parts based on their hierarchical organization. That would be a good place to inject some autoplacement if you get it figured out.

If others are interested in this and wireviz they might also like to know about https://github.com/devbisme/skidl. Used to make schematic specification in python.

Kinda off topic, but there's this project called skidl https://github.com/devbisme/skidl allowing you to create electrical schematics using Python. It seems to council your two interests, maybe for a fun side showoff project.

Take a look at this SKiDL discussion forums on GitHub: https://github.com/xesscorp/skidl/discussions/129

SKiDL (circuit design library) does this to a very large extent...

https://github.com/xesscorp/skidl