kicad_footprints VS skidl

Maybe SnapEDA and their new KiCad plugin [1] would be a good fit for you? I've not used the plugin myself but I do use SnapEDA footprints myself occasionally. I also try and keep on top of all the footprints available on GitHub and add them to our repo [2], you can add this globally and search through it from within KiCad.

1: https://blog.snapeda.com/2020/09/09/introducing-the-snapeda-...

2: https://github.com/kitspace/kicad_footprints

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