Annotation Between Projects

Hi all. I have a project that requires two PCBs to be made. I want to keep a high level overview of what’s going on, as it makes it easier to review and keep track of connections between the PCBs. I am basing it off of this Hierachical design with multiple PCBs for the style. Basically it is three projects, with the root project being for annotation only and schematic printing. The two other projects are for PCB layout.

I have a weird issue where, when in the root project, I will run “Annotate” for the entire schematic. It will update the schematic for all items in there. When I switch over to the PCB project items, the “Annotation” is there for the standard schematic symbols but is missing for the custom made ones. I have opened the relevant *.sch file and found that the annotation is not in there. It does show up in the root project however.

So I am trying to figure out where the annotation information is stored as it seems to be on a “per project” basis and ignores what is in the *.sch file.

Application: KiCad
Version: (5.1.9)-1, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.5
libcurl/7.71.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1g (Schannel) zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.3.0 libpsl/0.21.0 (+libidn2/2.3.0) libssh2/1.9.0 nghttp2/1.41.0
Platform: Windows 8 (build 9200), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
Build Info:
wxWidgets: 3.0.5 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8)
Boost: 1.73.0
OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
Curl: 7.71.0
Compiler: GCC 10.2.0 with C++ ABI 1014

Build settings:
USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
USE_WX_OVERLAY=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=OFF
KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
KICAD_SPICE=ON

I dusted off the project in which I did the experiment (file dates 2020-03-17)

And then:

  1. Made a copy of the project directory
  2. Opened the copy in KiCad.
  3. Re-annotated the “master” project.
  4. Save & Exit.
  5. Use meld merge to compare the differences between the directories.

The only files changed were the schematic files themself. I never made a PCB out of this, it was just a short experiment for me.

You can do this to yourself. Meld is an open source project and quite usable to check between differences of files or directory trees.

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