New PCB design block feature in KiCAD 10

[heeplr]

KiCAD 10 will support pcb design blocks in the next release [1] [2]
Schematic design blocks already exist in Version 9.

Design blocks are basically the equivalent of our SubCircuits.

Are there plans to support kicad design blocks in skidl?

In the end, it'd be awesome if premade layouts of subcircuits could be used in skidl generated netlists/layouts.

Then the only manual work that needs to be done would be:

1. place each pre-routed subcircuit
2. route the connections between subcircuits

That would save a lot of time with repeating layout blocks.

PS: should this be a feature request issue? I don't know... ;)

[1] https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/2508
[2] https://forum.kicad.info/t/pcb-design-block-usage/64686

[devbisme]

Are there plans to support kicad design blocks in skidl?

I don't know. How would you envision supporting design blocks in SKiDL?

[heeplr]

It'd be nice if one could select design blocks the way symbols and footprints are selected. Either polymorphic like
foo = Part(lib="designblock_library", name="designblock", ...)
or maybe with a new class
foo = DesignBlock("library", "name", ...)

Maybe it's easier to import a design block as "SubCircuit-with-a-layout" using some new constructor like

foo = SubCircuit(design_block="library:designblock")

In the end it gets loaded similar to Parts or SubCircuits and could be handled like those in skidl.

I didn't get the nightly running, yet so I'm not sure about PCB layouts.
I'm not even sure if netlists can include layouts in any way or if skidl had to produce a .kicad_pcb or use the new KiCAD IPC API instead of generating a netlist.

I wanted to start a discussion early for brainstorming before the release, to see if someone already thought about this.
Imho this is a killer feature since - in theory at least - it makes reuse of common PCB layout blocks easily possible.