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KiCad / kicad-footprints

Official KiCad Footprint Libraries for Kicad version 5
https://kicad.github.io/footprints
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HandSoldering vs HandSolder suffix #497

Open poeschlr opened 6 years ago

poeschlr commented 6 years ago

Currently the KLC mentions both these options.

We have 204 hand solder(ing) footprints in total. 114 of them use the HandSoldering suffix, which leaves 90 with the HandSolder suffix.

Which of the two should we use?

Some of them do not include the pad size modifier in their name. Example of this is the recently merged PR https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-footprints/pull/488

evanshultz commented 6 years ago

I prefer _HandSolder if we use one of these two, for brevity.

That being said, the concept for hand soldering is subjective. Depending on skill, iron tip, leaded vs lead free, etc., two people will have different opinions on what pad size is hand solderable. Or a footprint with big pads might be suitable for bottom-side wave solder because it provides solder thieving (and thus not hand soldered). To me either is a poor term to use because it's not defined.

While it would be a pain to rename 204 affected footprints uniquely by their pad size, perhaps it's better to bite the bullet and add the pad size to the footprint name if oversize pads are used. Or, and this is awfully ugly to me, but just use a generic term like _BigPads to describe them.

Ratfink commented 6 years ago

If footprint names are case-sensitive (I assume they are, but KLC doesn't say one way or the other. Then again, because footprint names are filenames, on Windows they might not be.), we actually have three suffixes in use. By a count I just did from master:

Suffix Count
_HandSolder 90
_HandSoldering 83
_Handsoldering 32
Total 205

We should definitely stick with one suffix for these. _HandSolder does win for brevity, so if we want the path of least resistance, I'd suggest just changing everything (including KLC!) to that. But I agree with Evan's points above about the ambiguity/subjectivity of the whole thing. Here's a thought: if we list pad sizes explicitly for all these modified footprints, why would we even need a suffix like _HandSolder in the name?

Interestingly, of the 88 of these footprints that list pad sizes, all use the _HandSolder suffix. We'd only be adding pad sizes to 117 footprints, which is still a lot, but at least it's better than 205.

stambaughw commented 6 years ago

What about just "Hand"? When there were "Reflow" and "Wave" variants of the SMT resistors and capacitors, we didn't use "ReflowSolder" and "WaveSolder". For the sake of consistency, we should pick one style. My preference is just "Hand" as some of our file names are rather lengthy. I could live with "HandSolder" as well. "HandSoldering" isn't any more descriptive than "HandSolder".

On 4/17/2018 1:56 PM, Clayton G. Hobbs wrote:

If footprint names are case-sensitive (I assume they are, but KLC doesn't say one way or the other. Then again, because footprint names are filenames, on Windows they might not be.), we actually have three suffixes in use. By a count I just did from |master|:

Suffix Count |_HandSolder| 90 |_HandSoldering| 83 |_Handsoldering| 32 Total 205

We should definitely stick with one suffix for these. |_HandSolder| does win for brevity, so if we want the path of least resistance, I'd suggest just changing everything (including KLC!) to that. But I agree with Evan's points above about the ambiguity/subjectivity of the whole thing. Here's a thought: if we list pad sizes explicitly for all these modified footprints, why would we even need a suffix like |_HandSolder| in the name?

Interestingly, of the 88 of these footprints that list pad sizes, all of which use the |_HandSolder| suffix. We'd only be adding pad sizes to 117 footprints, which is still a lot, but at least it's better than 205.

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poeschlr commented 6 years ago

Adding the pad size is a requirement with the new naming convention. (And yes i know this will be a lot of work.) Edit for clarification: It is only required for footprints with non default pad sizes. (like for footprints intended for hand soldering.) So this does not affect most footprints in our lib.

The HandSolder (or whatever) suffix is there to give the user a reasoning as to why this particular footprint has a differently sized pad to the default footprint. (This suffix clarification is mainly aimed at beginners i think so it should be easily understandable.)

If footprints with the HandSolder suffix really already have the correct name in other regards, keeping this suffix might generate the least amount of work. So my vote would be for this suffix. (To be fair i am a bit biased as a lot of these footprints are generated by my scripts.)