A Makefile for KiCad 7.0+ projects. It leverages the new kicad-cli command included in 7.0 to generate output data for distribution and production.

Usage

1. Clone this repository somewhere and define an environment variable KICADMK_DIR to the folder: export KICADMK_DIR=/home/me/kicad-makefile
2. Copy the example Makefile 'Makefile.example' to the KiCad project to build: cp Makefile.example /home/me/my_project/Makefile
3. Edit the example Makefile referring to comments as a guide.
4. Run make to run default target that builds output, a merged sch and pcb .pdf and a distribution and production .zip:

• ./output/my_project.pdf: merged pdf with sch pages and pcb copper layers.
• ./output/dist/my_project.zip: sch renders, pcb renders, bom, gerbers, pos and drill files.
• ./output/prod/my_project-prod.zip: bom, gerbers, pos and drill files.

Refer to 'Kicad.mk' for other targets.

The project is alpha status and also consider that the kicad-cli command is at an early stage; things might change!

Extra Setup

• BoM: KiBOM by default, requires install either with pip or path to repository - see Makefile.example and './bin/kibom'. Can be defined with BOM_CMD and BOM_CMD_FLAGS. Note that by default, the KiBOM script appends to target output so will be re-built whenever BOM_FILE is a prerequisite. One can fix this by supplying a 'bom.ini' with output_file_name = %O.

Container

A target to build a docker container is available make image. One can then run make within the KiCad project folder with:

docker run --rm -v "$(pwd)":/project kicad-makefile:latest make

The project also publish a package:

docker pull ghcr.io/tuna-f1sh/kicad-makefile:latest

Integration with CI/CD

See my entree project as an example of how to use this to build outputs for release etc.

Useful Variables

Defaults shown, can be set in Makefile or environment. Refer to Makefile.example for others.

# Main output folder for generated files
OUTPUT_FOLDER ?= $(PROJECT_ROOT)/output

# Dist sub-folders
DIST_FOLDER ?= $(OUTPUT_FOLDER)/dist
PROD_FOLDER ?= $(OUTPUT_FOLDER)/prod