Can symbols assign netnames?

I had a brainwave, may be nothing.

You are looking at the content of a schematic sheet. I made an I2C bus alias with SDA and SCL. I manually added the SDA and SCL labels in order to actually make the connections.

The symbol (I2C Oled) has pins which are already named SDA and SCL. For the sake of readability the labels are therefor redundant. I can see myself what is SDA and SCL.

So I thought that it may perhaps be convenient if the symbol itself could push it’s own pin names to the attached wires if no external label is provided.

Than I don’t have to explicetely add these extra labels, they would become redundant. If you have many I2C or SPI or whatever things and all your symbols’ pins have proper names, you would also be unable (when using busses like these) to place a wrong label on a wire.

(Ofcourse you kinda deserve a disfunctional board if you actually manage to place an SDA label before an SCL pin :joy: )

Would others like such a feature?

Regards :tumbler_glass:

Bas

  1. Select some pins.
  2. Right click and choose: Pin Helpers / Net Label from the popup menu.

After that, you can pull the labels away from the symbol to drag out wires from the symbol. Also experiment with mirror (x or y keys) on the labels and m for move if you don’t want the labels on the ends of the wires.

Or you start from the other side. If you have a defined alias list for your bus, you can use the Unfold from Bus function.

image

The unfold from bus I was familiar with, the pin helpers not so much.

This box selected nothing, I could not select pins at all.

So I googled and learned I had to uncheck this box in global schematic settings.
afbeelding

Now I can acces the pin helpers. And I have one follow-up

Can I rotate them all at once? Or set a different default orientation?

R yields in this result :smiling_face_with_tear:
afbeelding

Kind regards :coffee:

Bas

Just like in the video I linked to, for me the labels start horizontally just as you would expect. And when rotating them as a block, they result is also (mostly) as expected. When rotating while dragging (so first g for drag, then r for rotate I get this result:

I am not sure, but I guess the symbol you used it on is rotated itself. Try it on a symbol that is not rotated.

My home PC is still on 7.0.11 I am not even seeing pin helpers. Time to migrate to K8.

I suspect that my labels are rotated because the last placed label had the same rotation. When K8 is up and running I can experiment with that.

Nope, I tested that before posting. Label orientation is remembered during placement of individual labels, but this rotation is not used for the pin helpers. Rotation of the symbol itself does appear to have an influence, but I did not look further into details.

It was indeed the rotation. For some dark reason which I can’t remember I made this symbol with all pins on the top side instead of the left or right. So logically I always rotate it 90 degrees when I use the symbol.

I verified it again, and created a bug report for this on gitlab.

It’s fixed! :+1:t2:

:tumbler_glass:

Bas

Indeed. Also, If you follow the link to the bug report issue I created on 2023-05-15, you can see:

jean-pierre charras closed via commit 87d3d385 May 16, 2024, 5:22 PM

And this is very common for KiCad. The combination of a clear bug description and an issue that does not take much programming effort often results in bugs getting squashed in days or even hours. I think the record dis 26 minutes between an created issue and “fix committed”.

It’s been a while since I counted it last, but there are between 200 and 300 issues that get fixed each month and that is quite amazing.

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