a repository for complete circuits designed in KiCAD
KiCAD is great. Well, mostly. It’s got its problems, but it’s open source and you don’t have to fit your circuits into some stupid bounding box or find work arounds to get them to a different pcb manufacturer. However, I find most of my time developing circuits is spent finding some circuit diagram that will work (usually on Google Images, sadly), and then testing that, transcribing it into KiCAD, transcribing it into LTSpice, finding the right parts on Digikey or Newark or whatnot, and iterating on that design until I figure out things that the original circuit designer had in mind.
These problems felt really familiar to me: they were a lot like what happens when trying to code new functionalities. There’s no reason for a thousand different people every year to make the same mistake in designing and testing a negative 5 volt regulated supply, just like there’s no point in people making the same mistakes implementing a heap sort. Programmers use git to solve this, why shouldn’t hardware designers? git would let hardware designers use the issues feature, iterate on their circuits leaving messages for why they changed, and even import others circuits into their own.
KiCAD is pretty conducive to git, because it’s open source and plain text, but it still needs some help. I plan to make this repo a website for sharing circuits. If anybody sees this repo, what is below is an outline of how I plan to implement this sharing service for circuits, and the features I will try to get to outside of my day job. Send me an issue/feature request if you want anything else!
