Importing BOM from schematic instead of PCB

[salfter]

I have some projects that involve sockets for certain components that I want to be removable. I put these in a hierarchical sheet for which the "exclude from board" property is set. PartDB imports PCB BOMs, though, which won't include any components that were excluded from the board in the schematic.

I knocked together a little bit of Python that massages a schematic BOM (produced with the Tools -> Generate Bill of Materials... menu item in the schematic editor) into the PCB BOM format so it can be imported into PartDB.

#!/usr/bin/env python

# converts KiCad schematic BOM to PCB BOM for PartDB import

import csv
from sys import argv

with open(argv[1], newline="") as sch_bom:
  dialect=csv.Sniffer().sniff(sch_bom.read(1024))
  sch_bom.seek(0)
  reader=csv.DictReader(sch_bom, dialect=dialect)
  dest_header=["Id", "Designator", "Footprint", "Quantity", "Designation", "Supplier and ref", None]
  with open(argv[2], "w", newline="") as pcb_bom:
    writer=csv.writer(pcb_bom, delimiter=";", quotechar="\"", quoting=csv.QUOTE_STRINGS)
    writer.writerow(dest_header)
    id=1
    for row in reader:
      writer.writerow([id, row["Reference"], row["Footprint"].split(":")[1], row["Qty"], row["MPN"], None])
      id=id+1

The script is also available from https://gitlab.alfter.us/salfter/bomfix.

Perhaps a future version of PartDB might allow importing a schematic BOM directly (all of the needed information is in there), but until then, maybe others will find this useful.