Contributing
If you find KiBot useful please consider contributing to the project. There various ways to contribute. Of course donations are welcome (donate), but there are other ways to contribute:
In general:
Your workflow: What’s missing in KiBot for your workflow? Comment it in the discussions
Configuration for a manufacturer: If you have a configuration known to work for a manufacturer please consider contributing it. Even if this is a small manufacurer, this helps to know what are the most common options.
Mention KiBot: If your project or company uses KiBot you can mention it, so people know about KiBot. Also if you are reporting a KiCad issue, currently KiCad developers doesn’t pay much attention to automation details.
If you are a Windows/Mac OS X user:
If you managed to run it locally consider contributing a tutorial of how to do it.
If you run KiBot on CI/CD and want to run it locally: consider investing some time on tests. Just comment in the discussions and I’ll help you to run tests to adapt the code. Now that KiCad 6 uses Python 3 most of KiBot functionality should work on Windows and Mac OS X. People are using WSL to run KiBot, but we don’t have a tutorial about how to do it.
If you use a Linux that isn’t derived from Debian:
Consider helping to add better support for it. Do you know the name of the packages for the dependencies? Do you know how to create a package for your distro?
If you are good writing tutorials:
Consider writing some tutorial about using KiBot. Some examples:
How to start using it
How to use filters/variants
How to create good BoMs
If you know Python:
Create a new output: KiBot is modular, creating a new output can be done just using some of the
kibot/out_*
files as template. The outputs works as plugins and they are automatically discovered by KiBot. Note that you can add them to~/.config/kibot/plugins
Add regression tests: If you know about Python testing you can add tests to
tests/test_plot/
. We try to cover 100% of the code. Even simple tests that check the code executes are welcome.
If you know HTML/CSS:
Internal BoM styles: You can just take a look at the generated HTMLs and contribute a CSS, or take a look at the code (
kibot/bom/html_writer.py
) and add more functionality.Navigate results styles: Similar to the above but for the
navigate_results
output (kibot/out_navigate_results.py
).
If you have drawing skills:
Navigate results icons: Currently we have only one set of icons, they are from KiCad 6. Alternative icons are welcome.