← KiCadRoutingTools

KiCadRoutingTools — reach

drandyhaas/KiCadRoutingTools · collected 2026-11-12T15:08:44+00:00 · rebuilt daily from GitHub's API

Downloads by release

Estimated before 2026-09-20, measured from then on. A release's counter is cumulative and never stops rising, so before the archive began the only facts are each release's lifetime total and its dates. Each total is spread evenly over the release's reign: from when it became the newest release until its successor took over. For the PCM zip both dates are when KiCad's catalogue began serving a version, read from the merge history of kicad/addons/metadata, because PCM serves only its newest listed version and skips every release in between. The measured days show why this is the right window: when a successor arrives, the old release drops to a trickle within a day. So a level of interest that stays flat draws a flat line, however many releases have been published. The PCM line counts only the zips of releases PCM listed. Every other zip is on the dashed line as a direct download, because PCM cannot install a version it does not list: those come from the release page, or from automation (a release superseded two months earlier once took 415 zip downloads in a day, with its Linux binary climbing alongside and nothing else). Two known biases remain in the estimate: the trickle a superseded release keeps gathering is counted inside its own reign, so the earliest plateaus read slightly high, and even spread flattens the burst right after each release. From 2026-09-20 on, every point is the difference between two snapshots, spread over the hours between them, with no assumption at all; today is left out until it is over, because a part-day always looks like a collapse. Exact per-release totals are in the table below; the series are never added together.

Daily views and clones

Uniques are not additive. GitHub reports a unique count per day, and the same person on two days counts twice in any sum of them — so the card above says “unique-days”, not “people”. Only the daily figures are true uniques.

Weekly activity

The newest week is almost always partial, and a partial week always looks like a collapse — so the day count is shown whenever it is under seven, and the week-over-week column is withheld rather than computed against a stub. Lifetime since collection began (72 days banked): 55,583 clones, 28,727 views. These totals only ever grow from here — the days before the first snapshot are gone from GitHub and cannot be recovered.

Manual vs automated clones

There is no way to count human clones, only to estimate them. GitHub reports a count and a unique count and nothing else — no user agent, no IP, no actor — so any figure here claiming to be “people” would be invented. Unique cloners is the closest proxy, because a person clones once or twice while an automated fetcher clones repeatedly from few addresses; the ratio is therefore an automation index, not a headcount. Ordinary days sit near 1.4–1.9. The peak in this window is 21.21 on 2026-10-30, at 4,985 clones against only 697 views: machines, not readers. This project's own CI is not the explanation and is not subtracted: a release run is seven jobs, so about seven checkouts against a spike of several hundred. The excess is other people's automation — downstream CI, mirrors, release trackers — which no API available here can identify, so it is disclosed rather than adjusted by a correction that would explain about 1% of it.

Downloads per release

PCM and binaries are different audiences and are never summed. KiCad's Plugin and Content Manager fetches the zip from whichever release it currently points at, so PCM installs pile up on that one release and a newer release showing few zip downloads means PCM has not been pointed at it — not that interest collapsed. The grid_router-* binaries are fetched by build_router.py, so they count from-source installs, including this project's own CI: every Modal image build downloads the Linux binary, which makes Linux an upper bound rather than a user count.

New downloads between snapshots

Platform mix

Where visitors come from

What this cannot tell you

A download is not a run. Nothing here distinguishes one person routing daily from a hundred who installed once and never opened it again, and nothing here reports a crash, a failed route, or which KiCad or Python version anyone is on. This project collects no telemetry, so those questions stay unanswered by design. What these numbers are good for is reach, platform mix, release adoption and trend — and for noticing when a week goes unexpectedly quiet.