Kicad Revision Inspector (KiRI)

KiRI is small tool to experiment having a visual diff tool for Kicad. It uses Kicad-Diff to generate layout diffs and Plotgitsch or xdotool/cliclick to generate schematic diffs.

It currently supports projects of Kicad 5.* and Kicad 6.* using git for source management.

Schematics on Kicad 6 are handled graphically by xdotool on Linux/Windows and by cliclick on macOS.

Cliclick neeeds System Preferences → Security & Privacy → Accessibility for Terminal enabled.

Installing

To install this tool with on any Operating System, open a terminal and execute the following commands:

Windows users must use WSL/WSL2. See, Environment preparation on Windows section.

macOS users must have homebrew installed

Installing (and Resintalling) dependencies

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leoheck/kiri/main/install_dependencies.sh)"

Installing (and Reinstalling) KiRI

# The default installation path is "${HOME}/.local/share" 
# It can be changed which the KIRI_INSTALL_PATH environment variable.
# Example: export KIRI_INSTALL_PATH=/home/$USER/Documents/

bash -c "INSTALL_KIRI_REMOTELLY=1; \
    $(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leoheck/kiri/main/install_kiri.sh)"

xdotool, used to plot schematics of Kicad 6 (.kicad_sch) requires a X Window System Server. Some of the alternatives include Xming, Cygwin, and Mobaterm.

Environment preparation on Windows

Configure WSL

For WSL1, on a Powershell terminal with admin right, execute the following commands:

# Enable Windows Subsystem for Linux (using Power Shell)
dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux /all /norestart
Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux
#Install-WindowsFeature -Name Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

# Install Ubuntu 20.04
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://aka.ms/wsl-ubuntu-2004 -OutFile ~/Downloads/ubuntu-2004.zip
New-Item -Path C:\ubuntu-2004 -ItemType Directory
Expand-Archive -Path ~/Downloads/ubuntu-2004.zip C:\ubuntu-2004
Set-Location C:\ubuntu-2004
& .\ubuntu2004.exe

For WSL2, on a Powershell terminal with admin right, execute the following commands:

wsl --set-default-version 2
wsl --install -d ubuntu

After, install dependencies and Kiri by running script in the Installing section

Loading KiRI environment

Setup the environment using the following commands.

Make sure KIRI_HOME is the right path to the installation folder

# Kiri environment setup
eval $(opam env)
export KIRI_HOME=${HOME}/.local/share/kiri
export PATH=${KIRI_HOME}/submodules/KiCad-Diff/bin:${PATH}
export PATH=${KIRI_HOME}/bin:${PATH}

On Windows/WSL, it is needed to launch the XServer (e.g Xming) and also have the DISPLAY set correctly Add the following lines in the end of the ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc to set DISPLAY. Also, launch kicad manually or any other GUI tool like xeyes to test if X11 is working.

# Set DISPLAY to use X terminal in WSL
# In WSL2 the localhost and network interfaces are not the same than windows
if grep -q "WSL2" /proc/version &> /dev/null; then
    # execute route.exe in the windows to determine its IP address
    export DISPLAY=$(route.exe print | grep 0.0.0.0 | head -1 | awk '{print $4}'):0.0

else
    # In WSL1 the DISPLAY can be the localhost address
    if grep -qi "Microsoft" /proc/version &> /dev/null; then
        export DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0.0
    fi

fi

Using KiRI

cd [kicad_git_repo]
kiri

Alternatively, it is possible to pass the filename

cd [kicad_git_repo]
kiri board.pro

Command line flags (aka Help)

Command line flags can be seen using the -h flag

kiri -h

Kicad/PCBNew integration

It is possible to integrate KiRI on PCBNew adding a button to the toolbar

# Create folder if it does not exist
mkdir -p ~/.kicad/scripting/plugins

# Copy the plugin there
cd kiri
cp -r kicad_plugin ~/.kicad/scripting/plugins/kiri

Archiving generated files

There is a possibility to archive generated files. to visualize generated files, unpack the folder anywhere and execute the webserver inside of the folder, as shown below:

tar -xvzf kiri-2021.11.18-16h39.tgz
cd kiri
./kiri-webserver.py .

Examples

Schematic view, assets generated using Plotkicadsch

Layout view, assets generated using Kicad-Diff

Comparing the new .kicad_sch file with an old .sch

Demo on YouTube