Adding Pins to Component

Hi,

I am not sure my pins are properly connected to the component body. These pics do not look like the pictures from the manual, and they generally don’t make sense.

It looks like the pins are merely visually matched, but not “connected” or something. What am I doing wrong?

KiCad 5, rc2

The orientation is wrong, you need to rotate them 180 degrees.

Thanks! But why?.. What is the reason for the pins on the right and facing to the right to be properly called “left orientated”?

I have no idea…the directions in KiCad seem backwards to me, I often have to try a couple of times to get it right. :confused:

Dorsal/Ventral convention mismatch, perhaps?

If you look at the pins you will see small circles. These circles are the connection and reference point of the pin. So the direction defines in what direction relative to that point the line is drawn.

And yes i am also always confused by this. Maybe some better wording can be found after the v5 release.

I think it is just one of those things that no matter which way it was some people would find it backwards. The same goes for up and down, you just to have think in terms of where the pin connects to the body of the symbol. Fortunately the little graphic in the dropdown list of that dialog box helps.

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I love KiCad overall and the annoyances I have with it are small.
But the backward drawing on the pin’s is one of the annoyances left.
Orientation “Left” is for pins on the Right side of the component.
Orientation “Right” is for pins on the Left side of the component.
Orientation “Down” is for pins on the Top of the component.
Orientation “Up” is for pins on the Bottom of the component.
It’s weird. Every PCB package has it idiosyncracies. This is one of KiCad’s.

Presumably they meant with “Left” that the component body is on the Left side of the pin.
I would like to have this changed.

But a great feature of KiCad’s shortcut’s. You can hover with your mouse over a pin in the “Part Library Editor” and press ’ r ’ to rotate a pin. You don’t have to open a menu.
Same if you press [Shift] and drag your mouse around some pins.
You’ll have the pins as a bloc connected to your mouse cursor, drag them to an empty area and press ’ r ’ to rotate. Repeat, and then the the 3rd time drag the block to the right orientation.

[Ctrl] + drag mouse also does something. It seems to mirror your selected block on the Y-axis.

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