kicad_skills

Datasheet analysis

One of the kicad_skills usage guides for the eda CLI — all six. Plain Markdown: read it directly, or hand it to whatever assistant you use.

Turns a datasheet PDF into things that can actually be read: per-page text, CSV parameter tables, extracted figures and rendered page images. Everything runs in the container (see the eda-environment guide), offline.

Getting hold of the PDF is out of scope here - download it however you normally would (the manufacturer’s site is the authoritative copy) and keep it in the repository, e.g. under docs/datasheets/, so later sessions can read it without network access.

Start by locating, not by dumping

A 60 page datasheet does not belong in the context window. Find the page first, then read only that page.

pdf=docs/datasheets/lm321.pdf

./bin/eda.sh datasheet info  "$pdf"                    # pages, metadata, is it scanned?
./bin/eda.sh datasheet find  "$pdf" "absolute maximum" "electrical characteristics"
./bin/eda.sh datasheet text  "$pdf" --pages 3-4        # only what matters

find returns page, match and a text snippet for each hit; --regex enables patterns ("\d+\.\d+ *V"). datasheet info also reports likely_scanned: true for image-only PDFs — those need --ocr.

Reading the different kinds of content

Need Command
Text of selected pages datasheet text <pdf> --pages 5-7 (--layout keeps columns, --ocr for scans)
Parameter tables as data datasheet tables <pdf> --pages 5 → JSON rows
Block diagrams / curves / package drawings datasheet images <pdf> -o out/img --pages 8-12
Anything vector-drawn (most figures!) datasheet pages <pdf> -o out/pages --pages 8 --dpi 200
Everything at once, into a directory datasheet parse <pdf> -o out/ --renders

Important: images only recovers embedded raster images. Most modern datasheets draw their pinouts, block diagrams and curves as vectors, so nothing is extracted. When a figure matters, render the page with datasheet pages and look at the resulting PNG with the Read tool — that is how a graph, a pinout drawing or a package outline gets reviewed.

Reading a curve or a pinout

./bin/eda.sh datasheet find  "$pdf" "typical performance"      # -> page 9
./bin/eda.sh datasheet pages "$pdf" -o /tmp/ds --pages 9 --dpi 220
# then: Read /tmp/ds/page-009.png

Use ≥200 dpi for graphs with fine gridlines, 150 dpi is enough for text pages. datasheet pages refuses to render more than 40 pages at once — narrow the range instead of raising the limit.

What to extract for a design review

When a part is used in a circuit under review, pull these and quote the numbers with their page:

  1. Absolute maximum ratings — supply, input voltage, current, junction temp.
  2. Recommended operating conditions — the range the design must stay inside.
  3. Electrical characteristics — the spec that the circuit actually relies on (offset, bias current, GBW, dropout, RDS(on), leakage …), and its test conditions. A number without its conditions is meaningless.
  4. Pin functions — especially enable/mode pins that must not float.
  5. Application information — the manufacturer’s recommended external components (decoupling, compensation, minimum load, soft-start) and layout guidance.

Report values as parameter = value (min/typ/max, conditions) — p.N, and say explicitly when a needed parameter is not specified in the datasheet.

Output layout of datasheet parse

out/
├── index.json        # manifest: pages, tables, images, detected sections
├── full-text.txt     # everything, page delimited
├── text/page-001.txt
├── tables/page-005-table-1.csv
├── images/page-008-img-01.png
└── pages/page-008.png     (only with --renders)
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