Pop!\_OS Electrical Engineering

Packages

• AVRDUDE - avrdude - http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/avrdude/
• KiCad - kicad - http://kicad.org/
• AVR Libc - needs packaging - libc-avr - https://www.nongnu.org/avr-libc/
• Arduino IDE - cc.arduino.arduinoide - https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software
• Fritzing - org.fritzing.Fritzing - https://fritzing.org/home/
• Digi-Key KiCAD part library - needs packaging - https://github.com/digikey/digikey-kicad-library/

For Future Consideration

• Eagle - https://www.autodesk.com/products/eagle/blog/how-to-install-autodesk-eagle-on-windows-mac-and-linux/

Notes

Regarding libraries in KiCAD

you would have to add the libraries to the global symbol1 and footprint library2 tables that get installed with KiCad. Out of the box, the global symbol and footprint only support the libraries provided by the KiCad project. Otherwise users will have to do it themselves in order to use the libraries. I haven't looked but if the Digi-Key libraries include 3D models for the footprints, that requires a custom configuration unless you install the models in the same path as the 3D models that are provided by KiCad.

Libraries are going to be the most challenging issue. I know there are some good videos about setting up KiCad on YouTube which may be helpful and the KiCad user forum (https://forum.kicad.info/) may also be helpful.

Regarding packaging KiCAD

In the short term, the best possible KiCad experience for your users is going to be had by providing a wxWidgets 3.0.4 package built against gtk2 and a wxPython package built against the same wxWidgets package if possible. It may not build against 3.0.4 and you may have to fall back to 3.0.3 which I believe is built by default when building wxPython. You will get a warning about the wxWidgets mismatch when running kicad from the command line but most users wont ever see it. This works on Ubuntu 17.10 with GNOME as a desktop environment.

Most distros are starting to distribute wxWidgets 3.0.4 built against gtk3 which effectively makes the current stable release (5.0.1) unusable. KiCAD are working to rectify this issue. This will be released as version 5.1 hopefully before FOSDEM 2019. Unfortunately, the new wxPython project (Phoenix) decided to change from SWIG to SIP as it's scripting generation language which means it may be some time before we can support Phoenix as all of the scripting language generation code in kicad uses SWIG which may not work with Phoenix.

The longer you can stick with gtk2 builds of wxWidgets and wxPython, the better off your users will be. Once 5.1 is released, you should be able to convert over to gtk3 version of wxWidgets and wxPython. As for supporting Phoenix, that's anyone's guess at this point. Also, you will have to continue to distribute python2 because wxPython does not build against python3.