And the contributions should obey some rules.

This would need a trusted team who inspects the contributions. Any random user can give 5 stars if it happens to work for them (or even without any actual checking or testing). It’s what finally drove me away from Altium and onto KiCad completely.īut hey – says someone – why not add an in-built crowdsourced quality check, a 5-star system! Because you can’t trust the stars. This whole trying to “lock-in” people with library management is a pox upon the industry. I’ve seen a few efforts on github and gitlab to move towards a community managed library, but haven’t seen anything as far reaching (part count) as SnapEDA and UL.

The idea that every engineer is reproducing the same footprint, symbol and model for a part is grossly inefficient and much more prone to errors than if we were all checking each other’s work. Has this gotten significantly better?Īlso I’m really surprised that there is not a more community driven library management push. What do you find to be wrong typically? Symbol creation can be quite quick, but I find footprint creation to be a very tedious task (but I haven’t tried this in v6 yet, so maybe its more efficient?) I felt getting dimensionally accurate footprints in kicad < v5 to be a nightmare. I haven’t noticed any “errors” so to say yet, but I often have to rework symbols as they’re unnecessarily split into two parts and things like that. Generally, it’s faster for me to construct a footprint/symbol rather than try to hunt down the errors from SnapEDA. The footprints and symbols tend to have significant errors if you start looking. Personally, I don’t find things like SnapEDA to be that useful. This still requires you to login and download the zip files yourself, so I don’t think that would be an issue.

If you look in the files you get, those files themselves have a restrictive license. Generally those services require a login because they are trying to “monetize” you. Does the SnapEDA or UltraLibrarian license actually allow you to do this?

Snapeda altium plugin