uConfig

An old personal project resurrected to extract pinout from PDF datasheet and create Kicad schematics.

Directly save Kicad library files. Work better with huge number of pins.

PDF extraction, how does it work ?

The extraction of pin mapping from PDF files is done by parsing datasheet. Poppler is used to extract blocks of text and with magic rules, it sorts the pin numbers and pin labels. Labels and numbers are associated by most relevant pair to create pins. Then, the list of pins is also sorted and associated by packages. This list of package could be save as a kicad library.

The second part of the tool is named pinruler, to permit a reorganization following a set of rules named KSS (Kicad Style Sheet). KSS files are similar to CSS files, take a look to KSS reference variables.

It exists a command line tool to extract components from a datasheet :

uconfig datasheet.pdf -o lib1.lib -r microchip.kss

It will be save in lib1.lib all the schematics of components found in datasheet.pdf formated with the microchip.kss KSS file rules.

A GUI interface is also available, called uconfig_gui.

KSS, Kicad Style Sheet

An innovative way to define a theme for a schematic component inspired from CSS. This could be compare to a kicad library linter. You can find examples in rules/ directory or take a look to KSS reference variables.

TODO

• CSV importer
• multi-pages components
• BGA footprint

Bugs

If any component extraction does not work, send an issue in issues and give the link to the datasheet and page of the rebel component.

Binaries downloads

For convenience, a pre-built project is available at :

https://ci.appveyor.com/api/projects/sebcaux/uconfig/artifacts/uconfig-win32-v0.zip

Dependencies and building

Qt5

uConfig use Qt5 C++ Framework. Version 5.2 is the minimal supported.

To know your Qt version :

qmake -query QT_VERSION

To install on Ubuntu (or Debian):

sudo apt install qt5-default qttools5-dev-tools

poppler

poppler is a pdf parser library under GPL v3 license. v0.41 is the minimal supported with qt5 frontend.

To install on Ubuntu (or Debian):

sudo apt install libpoppler-qt5-dev

For windows, build from sources (very annoying) or find a built version here :

• includes : http://robotips.fr/data/bin-poppler-win32.tar.gz (uncompress to uconfig/bin/)
• DLLs : http://robotips.fr/data/include-poppler.tar.gz (uncompress to uconfig/)

build

cd uConfig
mkdir build
cd build
qmake ../src/uConfig.pro
make -j4

build on macOS

brew install qt
brew install poppler
cd uConfig
mkdir build
cd build
qmake ../src/uConfig.pro
make -j4
cd ../bin
macdeployqt uconfig_gui.app -libpath=./
# the uconfig_gui.app can the easily be started as a normal mac application