Hi,
This is not the first time I’ve run into this problem. I have the footprint and symbol file added to kicad and I can add the symbol in my drawings but the footprint is not linked and I can’t find the footprint when I search for it. The weird thing is that it is visible in the footprint editor. So why can’t I find it when trying to connect a footprint to a symbol?
Thanks, hope this is easy to solve.
I just found out what’s wrong. When I tried to connect a footprint to a symbol, I searched for the footprint name, but it was in a folder called Footprints, which I had to search for because the search bar does not search for files in a folder.
The stupidity of this program sometimes baffles me…
What do you mean with “search for”? There are many different ways to “search for” something in KiCad.
KiCad does search inside all registered libraries, but it does not search your whole file system for the libraries themselves. You have to add both the symbol and the footprint libraries manually to Preferences / Manage Symbol Libraries and Preferences / Manage Footprint Libraries**.
When I search for StepDown it won’t find the footprint, I have to search for Footprint because for some reason it’s in that folder. If you ask me the whole system for adding symbols and footprints is really weird and does not makes sense to me at all.
On the left side of that dialog are the footprint libraries (What you’re calling folders). They’re the one that KiCad has buildin and apparently also one with the not very creative name “footprints”, which you probably created yourself. (A clearer name probably would’ve been “My Footprints” or “Tok Toks Custom Footprints”, but there are of course tons of ways you could organize your own footprints, especially once you have more than 5).
In the second columns you find all footprints in each library/folder. Make sure you use the correct filter, because the first one filters the libraries (folders) and the second column filter filters footprints.
I just put the footprints files in the footprints folder in the Documents folder in windows. Apparently it then takes the folder name and uses that in kicad, good to know. I readme file in that folder would have been nice.
For the searching, it’s just weird that there is no way to just search for a file name. How am I always supposed to know in which folder components are. Do I really have to go to the general window for components, search for it there, remember the folder and then go back to the previous window…
Upgrade to v8 and you’ll get a dialog that searches across all libraries.
Ah, I forgot that weird moment in V7 when you had to select a library first. Glad that’s gone now.
And there are several different ways to assign footprints, for example: Schematic Editor / Tools / Assign Footprints This works very nicely with several different filters you can enable or disable. One of the filters is for keywords you can set in: Footprint Editor / File / Footprint Properties
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