Associate several symbols with a single footprint

Greetings.

I am new to KiCad and wasn’t able to find anything similar on the forum (maybe my wording was just bad), so here goes:

I have a schematic including eight Connector:8P8C_Shielded symbols and want to associate those with a single Connector:RJ45_Amphenol_RJHSE5380-08 footprint, which is an 8-port connector.

How do I go about that? Is there a simple way or do I need to create a multi unit 8P8C symbol first?

How should that physically work? I mean you have 8 connector symbols each with 8 pins and want to give all of them only 8 pins on the PCB? Or did I misunderstand your question?


In general: One symbol always represents one physical device.

Yes, you misunderstood the question.

The footprint I was talking about is an 8 port RJ45 jack, with 64 pins of course. If I didn’t miss anything, all the RJ45 symbols in the lib are single RJ45 jacks. So I assumed there must be a way to use those together.

(Actually, I am talking about an Amphenol RJHSE 5381-02 2 port jack which doesn’t exist in the footprint library yet and two 8P8C_LED_Shielded symbols, but the principle stays the same.)

That explains it.

KiCad does not claim that there is a symbol for every available part in the lib. In this case a symbol for this component is simply missing and is left for the user to create.

My suggestion is to copy the current rj45 symbol and give it 8 subunits with the normal rj45 symbol in each unit (of course with the pin numbers assigned to fit the footprint correctly.)
Can be done by selecting “all units” for every graphical element and pin (might even be already done in the single unit symbol if you are lucky)


If that footprint is from the official lib then you can create a pull request that adds this symbol to the lib. (I would suggest to simply add x8 as a suffix at the end of the normal symbol name and place it in the same library.)

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Thanks so far.

Followup:
These parts exist as 1, 2, 4 and 8 way.
As I need to create those anyway, I would like to add them to the official lib.
Would it be reasonable to create four different footprints and a single 8 sub unit symbol named 8P8C_x8 or whatever for use with all of those or rather four separate symbols for each respective footprint?

Requirements for the official footprints are high. You must read, understand and obey the KLC: https://kicad.org/libraries/klc/.

My dual port footprint at least passed the automated checks so far…

Still, as I’m not very familiar with the usual KiCad workflow yet, any insights to my question regarding matching symbols would be appreciated.

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