Custom KiCAD libraries under Windows

When you’re using KiCAD on Windows using the very well working KiCAD WinBuilder then you might have found out that it can be difficult to use custom KiCAD libraries due to the fact that, at least at the moment, the library variables in KiCAD cannot be modified in the GUI.

Under a linux environment it is quite common to set and change environment variables due to the fact that every advanced user is capable of using the terminal. However, under Windows things work a bit different and it can be quite ugly to set and change those variables in the Windows system environment variable editor.

But there is a by far easier (and by the documentation suggested) workaround: You can set KiCAD environment variables in the setenv.bat batch file. This batch job is automatically executed before the actual KiCAD starts up when you clicked the shortcut provided by the KiCAD WinBuilder. Therefore, you can define the path to your custom KiCAD libraries by overwriting the KISYSMOD and KISYS3DMOD variables:

SET KISYSMOD=C:\Users\Tectu\Documents\projects\resources\kicad_libs\modules
SET KISYS3DMOD=C:\Users\Tectu\Documents\projects\resources\kicad_libs\modules\packages3d