IMO, KiCad is one of the best EDA tools out there, with just one major problem: Bill of Materials management is rough. If you make more than 1 board a year, you probably know how frustrating it can be to get everything together for an order. There are multiple ways to export a BOM (each with their own ups and downs), and the process of selecting and entering components is excruciatingly manual.
You can of course create custom components on a per MPN basis, but this can be time consuming and forces you to maintain a large number of individual component libraries.
The goal of this app is to ease the bom management burden on designers who choose to use Kicad for their layout and schematic capture needs, allowing for faster, easier data entry, and to provide a part database for re-use in future designs.
- python 3.6
- sqlalchemy
- wxPython (pip install should work on most platforms, otherwise, see wxPython.org
Deprecated:
- kivy >= 1.9.0
- kivy garden
- navigationdrawer
garden install navigationdrawer
Simply enter a part's manufacturer, supplier, manufacturer PN, and supplier PN then click 'save to datastore'. Information is keyed off of component value and footprint, so future uses can simply use the part lookup button to retrieve the information. Multiple suppliers, manufacturers, and part numbers are supported.
Everybody miskeys from time to time, this feature detects (to the best of its ability) components that are the same, but simply have mislabeled values. For example: (10K, 10k, 10 K) will be consolidated into a single value selectable by the user.
*Only components that share a footprint are consolidated.
Exports PCBNew style component agregate BOMs as CSV. Suitable for upload to digikey/mouser/octopart/etc
All changes can be saved back to KiCad Schematics
The tool has to store its information somewhere, so it uses kicad's custom component fields. Currently, the fields SPN, MPN, SPR, MFR, SPN, SPURL and DESC are reserved for use. If these fields do not exist, they will be automatically added to each component as it is accessed. The tool does not attempt to do any import or translation of other existing fields (field remapping could be added in a future update).
If you would like data propegated back to your kicad schematic, please
select Save Schematic from the menu.
- Allow the schematic file to be passed on the command line
- Added description field and allow SPURL to also be edited
- Added ability to ignore fidicials, holes, test points, etc.
- Added ability to ignore do-not-fit (DNF) and variants in value
- Properly handle multi-unit components. Now components with multiple 'units' (i.e. a quad op-amp in a single package, with 4 schematic symbols) will show as a single line-item.
- If no extension is provided on a bom export, a .csv will be automatically appended to the exported file
- Removed old Kivy based version
- Moved datastore/config location to ~/.bomsaway.d (Note: Existing databases will be automatically migrated)
- Added Recent File Functionality
- Misc bugfixes
- Semantic versioning + About page
- Fix outstanding todo items in source
- Add Unit tests
- User Guide
- Clean up user screens
- Set default save directory to schematic directory
Allow exporting of _bom.csv on a per vendor basis to allow ease of uploading/ordering
Enable part price lookups and stock amount checking
View overall prices / quantity ordered
Same as Octopart
- Part inventory accounting
- Better UX :)
GPLv3, see LICENSE for details.
This project uses sch.py from kicad library utils (also GPLv3)
Contributions welcome (and wanted!), please send a PR.