Clarification needed on eeschema toolbar buttons

Dear KiCad user,
Could you say brief about the symbols except first one which is wire,other than that three symbols are where to use and how to you in the schematic and how they will appear in layout. how to use differential wire in the layout and how to create it.

Screenshot%20(58)

https://docs.kicad.org/5.1.5/en/getting_started_in_kicad/getting_started_in_kicad.html#bus-connections-in-kicad

As a beginner i suggest you stick to wires (top most button)

Everything below that is for working with buses. These are not really needed at the beginning and really only add a benefit if you work with hierarchical designs. (Buses in the current stable version of KiCad are a bit restricted in functionality) Info about using buses in hierarchical design see the end of Hierarchical or flat schematic design, what is best for me? (How to deal with multi page schematics?)

If you begin from analog circuits - yes. If you begin from microcontroller circuit using bus can really improve readability of schematic.

Buses in kicad v5 are just graphical lines. They do not add anything that the labels alone would not already take care of. So i would say buses are really not required until you get to making highly hierarchical designs. (Stick to clear labels and you will be just fine.)

That is why I have written only about readability of schematic.
I, personally, hate wires going nowhere ending with Labels (except GND, VCC,…). If they go ‘into’ bus I can easily find where they go out of it and need not to look through all the schematic to find the other wire end (and never be sure if I didn’t missed the ‘third’ end of the same wire).

1 Like

This is ok but I still would not call buses something a beginner should worry about. (I am still not sure anyone should but everyone is different)


As for me, I mostly use labels directly on pins. I only add a short wire to allow for the highlight tool to work. (Either local labels or hierarchical labels, i never use global labels.) So for me a bus would simply add visual clutter.
My label names are chosen like i name variables in programming. One should know just from reading the label name what it is meant to represent (means i have quite long label names). This would not be possible with buses as the labels used there need to follow a strict set of rules (<prefix><number>).
The long labels i use also help when laying out the PCB. A bus label would not really help that much there (The net name follows the label name so if the labels are clear then the netname will also be clear)


And my pages are generally quite empty as I make all my schematics highly hierarchical, so I really don’t have any trouble following what is going on. (Very deep hierarchical layer depth means most pages just connect different hierarchical sheets.) This is again a concept taken from programming.

Unfortunately any highlight tool doesn’t work at paper print (yet :slight_smile: ).

Here probably age difference influence :slight_smile: . At ‘my times’ the source code length was also limited - you had to perforate your program at paper cards. It made me being used to use short variable names.

Till now I use buses as only graphic so with no influence on label format.

My pages are generally full - one device - one A4 schematic. Thanks to it my under hand printed schematic archive is only about 100 pages.

Another difference between us. No tree must die for my schematics. (Highly hierarchical designs make no sense as a printout anyway)

Not only trees counts :slight_smile:
To view your schematics how much energy it costs? If you need your schematic at field where your system is installed you need laptop/notebook (I have never had laptop for my own).
About an year ago I sow the counter how much you load the nature (the redactor who published it said that with his data he get 130% and the task to reach to save nature is to have less then 100%). When I filled my data I get about 80% (I think mainly because I go to my work on foot, and the number of my flights by plane last year = 0 (really for last 30 years =0)).

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