Package Structure

Let’s create a component package around the ATtiny3227 as an example. That is the default symbol in @typecad/add-package script. After running the script just hitting enter for defaults, you’ll see this output:


Finished component creation, use it with:
 import { ATtiny3227_M } from './ATtiny3227_M';
 let u1 = new ATtiny3227_M();

Report any component creation issues: https://github.com/typecad/typecad/issues

Finished package creation, import it with:
 import { typecad_package } from "./typecad_package";

Report any creation issues: https://github.com/typecad/typecad/issues

You’ll see that it created a component file, ATtiny3227M.ts for us. It will contain all the code needed to create it and create named pins so we know what we’re connecting.

And more importantly, it created, a folder in ./src/ called typecad_package which will be the package we just created.

Package Contents

Inside the package folder, you’ll see the following:

  • package.json - the package.json file for the package. This is used by npm to manage the package.
  • ATtiny3227_M.ts - the component file. This is the file that contains the code to create the component.
  • index.ts - the main code for the package. This is where the majority of the code will be.
  • postinstall.js - a script that runs after the package is installed in other projects. It will copy the symbol and footprint files from the package (which is located in ./node_modules), to the project’s ./build directory. This step is needed to allow KiCAD to find the files, and also to create a fully-modular and self-contained directory structure for the package.
  • ./build - this directory contains symbol, footprint, 3d models or any other files that are needed by the component for use in KiCAD.

More about the ./build directory

typeCAD creates a KiCAD project that expects symbols and footprints to be in the ./build directory. In the case of the ATtiny3227 component, it is already in the KiCAD library. If we picked a component that wasn’t in the library, we would need to distrubute the symbol, footprint, and 3d models along with the package. This isn’t limited to just those files though; the postinstall.js script can be modified to do anything that may be needed. Remember that when the package is installed using npm i typecad_package, all the files will be in the ./node_modules/typecad_package directory, not the ./src directory.




Code