KiCad footprint collection

This is a collection of all the KiCad footprints I know of. If you know of any more, please let me know! All the official libraries are included in the KiCad/ sub-directory.

These are fairly regularily checked with Travis CI to make sure KiCad can load them.

Personally I use this with the footprint search in KiCad 5.

This repo uses git submodules. A submodule is a way of including another git repo in your repo holding it at a particular version until you want to update it. This is useful as you can easily keep a local copy of all the libraries, freeze them and only update when you want to.

Usage

Initialization

git clone --branch kicad-5 https://github.com/kitspace/kicad_footprints
cd kicad_footprints && ./init

This downloads all the libraries in parallel but it can still take a while.

If you are stuck on KiCad version 4 you can replace kicad-5 with kicad-4 in the above, the kicad-4 branch is not being updated though. If you use a KiCad nightly or development version you may get a few more footprints if you switch to the master branch:

git checkout master && ./init

Updating

If you want to update all libraries to their latest versions do:

./update

Warning: ./update will git reset --hard the submodules so don't make changes in these folders that you want to keep. Make a separate clone of the submodule respository for that.

If you want to pull in any libraries that have been added since your initial clone:

git pull && ./init

Registering with KiCAD

You can add these libraries manually through the KiCAD GUI of course. You could also use generate_table to generate an fp-lib-table, the file KiCAD uses as a footprint registry, with all the footprints from this repository. You can use this to replace your existing fp-lib-table. You will need to restart KiCAD for this change to take effect.

Linux

cp ~/.config/kicad/fp-lib-table ~/.config/kicad/fp-lib-table.backup
./generate_table ~/.config/kicad/fp-lib-table

Mac OS

cp ~/Library/Preferences/kicad/fp-lib-table ~/Library/Preferences/kicad/fp-lib-table.backup
./generate_table ~/Library/Preferences/kicad/fp-lib-table

Windows (using git-bash)

cp ~/AppData/Roaming/kicad/fp-lib-table ~/AppData/Roaming/kicad/fp-lib-table.backup
./generate_table ~/AppData/Roaming/kicad/fp-lib-table

Adding submodules

If you know of any KiCAD footprint repositories that have not been added please file an issue and I will add them.

If you want to maintain a private fork of this repository with some private submodules you can add them simply by:

git submodule add <git url> <folder>
git commit

They should work fine with the rest of the scripts once they are added.

License

Any scripts in this repository are MIT licensed. All the footprints have their own licenses of course.