Assign and label nets in high pin count component

Hi all, I’ve been doing PCB design for a couple of years now, but I’m still a bit new to KiCad.

I’m designing a mezzanine board that connects to an evaluation board I have. It uses a 400-pin FMC connector. I already have the symbol and footprint for the connector, and I have the pinout from the datasheet that I want to match on my board. Is there a simple way to assign the nets to all the pins?

It seems a bit tedious and prone to mistakes to manually place the wires and labels for each net in the schematic. Is there a way to do this programmatically, or even in a table like the symbol fields? Having a csv or text file with the pins and their assigned nets that I could import and apply to the schematic would be ideal. I was looking into using the python api, but I haven’t found much about using python to edit schematics. I don’t need to design the full schematic like this, I’d just like to do the pin assignments.

This seems like a common enough problem, especially with more complex components, that I’m wondering if there’s a simple solution already in KiCad that I’ve just missed. Thanks for the help!

KiCad V8 has the “Pin Helpers”:

And KiCad also has the [Ins] key to auto increment for any column of labels that ends with a number.

Scripting in the PCB editor has been available for several KiCad versions. In V8 you can also open a Python console in the schematic editor, but this is new in V8 and I am not sure how much you can do with it.

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.