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How to read KiCAD pick&place position file using pandas in Python

If you’ve exported a KiCAD pick & place position file using the GUI or the command line:

kicad_export_pos_to_file.sh
kicad-cli pcb export pos MyPCB.kicad_pcb --units mm -o MyPCB.pos

you can read it from within your Python script using pandas.read_table(...) like this:

read_pos_with_pandas.py
import pandas as pd

pos = pd.read_table('KKS-Microcontroller-Board-R2.2.pos', delim_whitespace=True, names=["Ref", "Val", "Package", "PosX", "PosY", "Rot","Side"], comment="#")

Optionally, you can also index pos by the Ref column (which contains values such as C12, D1 or U5):

set_index_example.py
pos.set_index("Ref", inplace=True)

You can also pack all that into a function:

read_kicad_pos_file.py
def read_kicad_pos_file(filename):
    pos = pd.read_table(filename, delim_whitespace=True, names=["Ref", "Val", "Package", "PosX", "PosY", "Rot","Side"], comment="#")
    pos.set_index("Ref", inplace=True)
    return pos

If you’ve used .set_index(), you can access a component such as C13 using

example_lookup.txt
pos.loc["C13"]

Example output:

example_output.txt
Val                100nF_25V
Package    C_0603_1608Metric
PosX                187.1472
PosY               -101.8243
Rot                    180.0
Side                     top
Name: C1, dtype: object

 

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