Autoimporting KiCad pretty footprints from hardware/*.sch

[brainstorm]

Hello @cnlohr,

Thanks much for publishing your projects as open hardware as well as the firmware, always inspiring stuff to learn from you.

I have been trying to reuse your .sch since I have a couple of modifications in mind to your design.

Sorry if this sounds obvious (I'm a relatively new KiCad user), but how can I auto-import the footprints for pcbnew without manually importing each .pretty library/module? as the KiCad docs state, i.e:

https://github.com/jdunmire/kicad-ESP8266

I thought about giving this giant meta-pretty-repo a shot, but the ESP footprint doesn't seem to be there:

https://github.com/monostable/kicad_footprints

I understand you might be using your existing installation/footprints from past projects, but what would be your advice to semi-automate this process of importing footprints?

[brainstorm]

I also meant including the .pro, .lib, etc files from KiCad like in the ESPUSB project:

https://github.com/cnlohr/espusb/tree/master/hardware/usb_8285

Also, totally understand if you don't want to release those yet before monetizing some boards a bit more through ebay, happy to start from scratch myself instead ;)

[brainstorm]

Hold on a minute... you are adding LoRa (RFM95W radio) to a sister board, that is so cool!!! Exactly what I wanted to do for my own board!

Closing this issue since I'm going on my own with KiCad from scratch, but would really appreciate forking/refactoring esplocalizer's hardware (instead of dealing with ?? and unresolved symbols/components from the bare .sch file)... is there a kicad-utils script or similar that helps resolving/downloading those?

[cnlohr]

That seems odd... It should be able to pull the footprints from the cache. Perhaps I forgot to include the cache?

[cnlohr]

Looks like I did! Fixed.

[brainstorm]

Awesome, thanks Charles! The eeschema looks great now with the cached file (no more ??'d components). The netlist can be generated without problems but it seems like Cvpcb is not liking the part assignments/mappings:

[cnlohr]

I believe most of them are in my public repository here: https://cnlohr.net/pubsvn/electrical/kicad/

Did you tell KiCad to download all footprints locally? If not, you should. It should give you the common parts like SM0603 and SOT23-5

[brainstorm]

Thanks Charles for following this up, super appreciated.

I found that svn a while later exploring, but then I switched to building my own board from scratch since I want to remove/change quite a few components and get more acquainted with KiCad.

Btw, if you ever move that repo to github, let me know, happy to include it to this semi-automated community repo, I've been using it recently, really handy:

https://github.com/monostable/kicad_footprints

[cnlohr]

I might, but, it's one of those things I like to keep on my own because I know where everything I need is.