- Generate PCB coils and place them on the circuit board
- Store these coils in a library so they can be assigned to a symbol
The KiCad Coil Generator is included with the official "Plugin and Content Manager" from KiCad version 7 or newer.
Download the latest release ZIP file. Open the "Plugin and Content Manager" from the KiCads main window and install the ZIP file via "Install from File".
Clone the repository to your local machine. Add a symbolic link from the addon's plugin folder to <user documents>/KiCad/<version>/3rdparty/plugins/. You can rename the sym-linked plugin folder to your liking.
This tool creates PCB coils that can be either directly inserted into the PCB itself, or exported as a footprint. The UI can be accessed from within the PCB editor:
(The button for the UI is located within the addon section)
This UI contains all relevant PCB coil settings to generate any desired coil.
By pressing the Generate Coil button, a new coil footprint is generated and inserted into the board. It can be moved freely but it has no schematic symbol attached to it. This makes it a bit tricky with netlists.
(Generated coil inside the PCB editor)
Once a fitting coil has been generated, that coil can be stored on disk as a footprint. The coil generator creates a new footprint library in the project's folder named PCB Coils (pcb_coils on disk) that is automatically set as project library in the current project.
(Footprint automatically exported can be viewed in the footprint editor)
Note: KiCad sometimes does not detect the addition of a new library to the project. A restart of the program fixes that issue. (It seems like this issue no longer exists in KiCad 8.0+)
- Add support for stretched coils
- Add support for rectangular coils
- Display coil statistics in the UI, similar to TI's implementation
The KiCad PCB Coil Generator as a whole is licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 3. See the license.