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alg0trader / kicad_toolbox

A set of supplemental plugin tools for use with KiCad Pcbnew.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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any 'toolbox' development? #1

Open easyw opened 3 years ago

easyw commented 3 years ago

Hi @aschaller I'm Maurice @easyw (from kicad StepUp and RF tools plugins...) I just noticed your interesting tools and tried the 'archived' one... It seems really promising... is there any news on the develop of this plugin?

Moreover I found your @Bloop-Radar project ... May I ask you which path do you use to create the KiCAD RF footprints? And which is the sw you used to design your filter elements? Are those OpenSource?

Thanks and Best Regards Maurice

alg0trader commented 3 years ago

Hi @easyw, unfortunately I have not had time to work on it. I was also going to wait for v6 to finish as I knew it would affect some of the python scripting. My goal was to offer many of the same transmission line features that Qucs or Microwave Studio provides. There may be some upcoming projects that will motivate me to complete it, but no guarantees.

The footprints for the bloop radar project were first simulated in Qucs, designed using LibreCAD, and then converted to a KiCad footprint using dxf2kicad_mod. This is mostly a manual process, but I wanted to eventually automate the translation of a Qucs schematic file to a Pcbnew footprint with a plugin script. This would be more ideal for any type of filter generated using Qucs.

easyw commented 3 years ago

@aschaller thanks for your info.

Do you know about Qucs-RFlayout? it should be a companion for Qucs for a better kicad integration. It does export to kicad_pcb and kicad_mod. I haven't tested ATM the file format, but it seems it goes with polygon shapes.

Regarding bloop RF, is it possible to share also the Qucs files? I would like to see a full open source project in RF to better understand the designing process. Your project would be a nice tutorial in RF designing IMO.