Developer Sébastien Caux has released a tool dubbed uConfig which aims to simplify an often-annoying part of the electronic development process: automated conversion between data sheet pin-out diagrams and KiCAD-compatible schematic symbol objects.

Brought to our attention by Hackaday, Sébastien’s uConfig started life as a personal project but has recently been released for public use. The tool takes a PDF-format data sheet in one end, and out of the other comes a KiCAD-compatible library file containing a labelled schematic component for the part.

“The extraction of pin mapping from PDF files is done by parsing datasheet. Poppler is used to extract blocks of text and with magic rules, it sorts the pin numbers and pin labels. Labels and numbers are associated by most relevant pair to create pins. Then, the list of pins is also sorted and associated by packages,” Sébastien explains. “The second part of the tool is named pinruler, to permit a reorganisation following a set of rules named KSS (KiCAD Style Sheet).”

The tool includes both command-line and graphical user interfaces, and has been released under the GNU General Public Licence 3. Full source code is available via the Robotips GitHub repository.