Changing the net on multiple items

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1

Why is it so hard to change the net on multiple electrically-connected items? You can change it all day and it silently ignores your manual change and reverts back without even notifying you of such. I am talking about items that might not even be in the schematic, if you just make items like lines or shapes and connect them together with or without traces, their net becomes silently immutable. Why?

Also, how can these be changed without brute-forcing it? In this context, brute-forcing means writing a script to edit the raw .pcb file without pcbnew open at all.

2

Did you try the properties manager to change the net? It works pretty good if you ask me.

Screenshot_20250417_090837
Screenshot_20250417_090837977×620 38.4 KB

3

Congratulations, you have found a bug (although you didn’t describe it properly, I just happened to find it by trying different things).

To trigger it:

  1. Draw some graphic items which touch (overlap) each other.
  2. Select them and attach them to a hierarchical net using the property editor.
  3. Try to change the net; it either succeeds or not.
  4. Select one item.
  5. Try to change the net; it either succeeds or not.

I didn’t find the logic when it succeeds and when not.

1 Like
4

Yes. It immediately reverts your change 100% of the time with no error message.

KiCAD 8.0.9