Ive just installed 8.0.7 and I am starting to pull my hair out when creating new symbols. Every pin I am placing is off grid, sometimes only just, meaning that when I place them in the schematic I am unable to make many connections because wires just dont line up. Help!
How can I make KiCad snap pins properly to my chosen grid?
Lets take the first example. I have gone to place a pin. My crosshair is aligned to the grid, but the mouse cursor itself is off to the top left (it doesnt appear in the screenshot unfortunately). Instead of the pin being placed at the crosshair, it is placed off grid at the mouse cursor instead.
Next, after placing the pin, I press the Down arrow key to place another pin below. In the properties window that appears, the pin is said to be at position x 1600 y 400 - incidentally at the coordinates where I had intended to place the first pin above. I press enter to insert the pin, and enter again to place it. This time the pin appears to place at the crosshair which is also where the cursor is in this instance due to using the arrow keys to move around.
I repeat the above process again to add a 3rd pin. I press the down arrow key. I press enter to add a pin, this time said to be at x 1600 y 500 according to the properties window. I press enter twice again.
Its the same story with the second pin where it said it was being placed on grid, but it too is ever so slightly off grid.
What am I doing wrong here, or is 8.0.7 buggy in some way? Ive had similar issues like this in the past, but not on this scale where every single pin I place is ending up off grid in some way. It is driving me nuts.
Surely not adding the pin number when placing a pin wouldnt cause such behaviour?
But as I test I tried adding some pins and gave one of them a number and it still ended up off grid even though initially it gave positions that were on grid.
At this point I am tempted to try a reboot of my machine. I have restarted KiCad a couple of times to no avail, but maybe something else silly is going on.
Just don’t send the library back to me after you are done!!!
One surprising thing: The grid units in the symbol editor are in inches. (Of course there is no real scale.) But when viewing my symbol file with a text editor, I do not see pin positions such as 0.2 for example. The position numbers are all like inch dimensions which have been converted to metric.
Not obviously related. But I experienced a bug in which footprints assigned in the schematic editor tended to revert to the footprints specified in the symbol library.
I kept a bunch of backup project folders and could see where a bunch of footprints were correct in an older folder but changed to incorrect in a newer one.
Like your situation, seemed to be a bug with KiCad in my computer and others could not reproduce it. I had work to do, so I dodged the problem by making new symbols which call out the footprints I needed.
For example I now have two resistor symbols; one for 0603 and another for 1206.
First up, I can’t reproduce your problem. Whether I create or move pins they snap to the grid.
One thing I noticed is that your pin coordinates are way way off the origin of the symbol sheet. Here’s my screenshot showing that my pin coordinates are at multiples of 100 mil (my grid is 50 mil, the default), whereas yours are up in the hundreds and thousands. You really should construct symbols around the origin. Maybe you tickled a very rare bug.
Hey. Its not up in the hundreds of thousands, just the low thousands, which would be in the low tens of grid positions. For this symbol (and for all symbols I create), the origin is smack bang in the middle of it, but as I have been testing I have been adding new pins just off to the side.
If I move the pins after creating them they will snap correctly to the grid. Its when I am adding multiple pins in succession, using the arrow keys to navigate around the symbol and place additional pins just using my keyboard. I have just never experienced this level of buggyness when doing this. In prior versions of KiCad I could lay down a lot of pins in quick succession using nothing but the keyboard and they would all be perfectly aligned to the grid. This behaviour has seemingly only come about in something upwards of 8.0.7 (the last version I was using was 8.0.1 so I figured it might have been time for an update).
I am very aware of the use of busses in the schematic - I use them all the time. BUS as a symbol in this case is an expansion bus header symbol with named pins for easy identification as opposed to a more generic multi-pin header/socket symbol. It allows me to lay out my schematic in a much nicer way (IMO).
I didn’t recognise your pin creation procedure but maybe your hotkeys are different. Here’s what I did.
Selected a writable library.
File > New Symbol
Enter symbol name. Ok.
P for Add Pin
Enter Pin Name and Pin Number. Ok
Moving the pointer jumps between grid snap points. Typically the window is zoomed in too far so I have to use F2 a few times. Click left mouse button to accept. Pin 1 is placed.
Ins key for repeat last action. Pin 2 with the same label A appears and also snaps to the grid.
But even still, I dont know why it should matter if I am this far off the origin.
But as a test I created a new symbol and placed one pin at 0,0 by aligning it there with the mouse. I then added two more pins down from this one using only the keyboard.
When editing the pins to view their coordinates, the first pin is at 0,0, the second pin is at -1.14961,99.2126, and the final pin is at -1.14961,199.30315 on a 100 mil grid.
So at least on the surface it doesnt seem to be some kind of bug with being far away from the origin.
