KiBot/experiments/variants/KiCost

KiCost variants (modern style)

This is an analysis and test of the variants implementation of KiCost An old style used kicost.VARIANT:FIELD to assign fields. So you could define kicost.V1:DNP.

What goes inside the SCH

• The variants are implemented using the variant field (version is an alias).
• The variant field can contain more than one value, valid separators are: comma ,, semicolon ;, slash / and space . Note: spaces are removed, and a vanriant tag can't contain spaces because this is a separator. (re.split('[,;/ ]', variants))
• Components without a variant are always included.
• Components with one or more variants are included only if requested (--variant REGEX matches any of the listed variants)

What goes outside the SCH

• When you generate the spreadsheet you can select one or more variants using a regex (--variant REGEX).
• Components containing one or more variants that match the regex are added.
• No exclusion mechanism is available.
• REGEX isn't case sensitive.

Where is in the code?

Source kicost/edas/tools.py function remove_dnp_parts(components, variant). The old mechanism is part of kicost/edas/eda_kicad.py function extract_fields(part, variant) combined with the above code.

Conclusion

Advantages

• Most of the information is inside the project.
• A regex allows pattern matching.

Disadvantages

• You only have an "include only" option.
• The regex could become complex.

Old mechanism

KiCost has a field rename mechanism. Fields named kicost.VARIANT:FIELD are:

• Renamed to FIELD if VARIANT matches --variant REGEX
• Discarded otherwise

This can be used with the DNP mechanism:

• The name of the field is dnp or nopop (case insensitive)
• If it contains anything other than 0 (evaluated as float) the component is removed.