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I'm a VHDL guy for work, and new to Kicad, so please forgive if this question is dumb.

I find it tedious to copy and paste a lot of circuit chunks to get the large matrices of diodes, IGBT's, etc for a high voltage, high current power supply. I much prefer to generate the netlist in Python. My reasons are as follows:

  1. It is labor intensive. I just plain hate hours of copy & paste.
  2. It is error prone. If I can get an algorithm that generates these circuits correctly, the result will be much more reliable than anything I draw by hand.
  3. I can easily simulate and build the same thing.

Assume that I have already entered symbols into Kicad so that it knows how to display components. Likewise for sub circuits. Also don't worry about how ugly the schematic is. I know having a schematic is great documentation, etc. I am asking the question at hand, nothing more.

What I want to do is import a file of S-expressions representing netlist and location information.

Does Kicad allow this?

If so, how do I do it?

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You can very easily generate KiCad schematic and PCB files using Python. There's no need to "import" anything into KiCad: just generate the simple format KiCad can natively read. It's a simple S-expression format. If you can generate a netlist, so can you generate perfect schematics and layouts that way!

If you need some ad-hoc code, I wrote some myself for converting font source files from KiCad 5 symbol libraries (.lib) to KiCad 6+ libraries (.kicad_sym). The overall file structure is the same for schematics and libraries - minor details differ. Look here:

A more full-fledged Python API for S-expr file I/O is also available from the KiCad Libraries project:

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