BOMs Away! – BOM/Component manager for KiCad

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.

Requirements

• python 2.7
• kivy >= 1.9.0
• kivy garden
• navigationdrawer garden install navigationdrawer
• sqlalchemy

Features

Self-curated component database

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.

Like-Part consolidation

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.

CSV Bom Export

Exports PCBNew style component agregate BOMs as CSV. Suitable for upload to digikey/mouser/octopart/etc

KiCad Backpropegation

All changes can be saved back to KiCad Schematics

This tool is opinionated!

The tool has to store its information somewhere, so it uses kicad’s custom component fields. Currently, the fields SPN, MPN, SPR, and MFR 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).

Schematic saves are not automatic!

If you would like data propegated back to your kicad schematic, please select Save Schematic from the menu.

TODO

• Semantic versioning
• Fix outstanding todo items in source
• Add Unit tests
• User Guide
• Clean up user screens

Planned Features

Multi-supplier BOM export

Allow exporting of _bom.csv on a per vendor basis to allow ease of uploading/ordering

Octopart integration

Enable part price lookups and stock amount checking

Bom Price Breakdown View (after octopart)

View overall prices / quantity ordered

Feature wishlist

• Part inventory accounting
• Better UX 🙂

For more detail: BOMs Away! – BOM/Component manager for KiCad