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by _fizz_buzz_ 1100 days ago
We switched from Altium to kicad and it was a good decision. However, we weren’t really successful to port projects from Altium to kicad. So, we still need a Altiun license. I am sure there are features in Altium that kicad is missing, but for our application - power electronics- we haven’t missed anything so far.
1 comments
neltnerb 1100 days ago
Did you use Altium BOM tools? I found them to be incredible, does KiCAD have something similar to handle BOM generation via something like octopart? I miss that, it made my BOMs so much more trustworthy.
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_fizz_buzz_ 1100 days ago
We did not use BOM generator via octopart in Altium. What we do now: We have our own kicad library which is mostly derived from the official kicad libary + some custom parts etc. We have all the information added to this library including Manfucaturer, MPN, datasheets etc. and from there we generate our BOM. There might be a more efficient way to do it, but we did something similar in Altium. So maybe we could have done better there too.
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neltnerb 1099 days ago
That seems reasonable. I found the digikey list bom export tool the other day and it looked awfully close but it was using the value for the part number because that's where I usually put them (with real values for passives). So it did pretty well for my special ICs but then had a bunch of like "10k" part names.

But okay, I have ten different resistor values but they're all the same symbol and package. Is there a field you know of where I could put a list of validated part number options for a given refdes? It sounds tedious but if it were connected with a search engine it would be no worse than altium.

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