I am a new KiCad user, but I am otherwise very familiar with schematic capture & PCB layout. I am creating a hierarchical schematic and have had no problems until now. For no apparent reason, the option to ‘clean up sheet pins’ no longer appears in the right-click menu. I have already used this function successfully numerous times, and now it’s just gone.
I changed the name of a sheet net, saved the schematic, and then went back to the root and imported the new net. The new net appeared, but the old one was still present. I went to use the clean-up function and saw that it was gone. I manually deleted the old net, but it reappeared when I imported more sheet pins.
At this point I am at a loss. Can anyone give me a clue as to what happened, and how I can get the clean-up option back? Thanks!
More information. I placed two more hierachical labels in the schematic, and imported the sheet pins on the page in the root. They showed up as expected.
Next, I went back to the schematic and deleted the new labels. Going back to the root, I had the ‘clean up sheet pins’ option back. Using this removed the newly-deleted labels. However, the one errant label was still present. It doesn’t appear anywhere on the schematic, but if I delete it on the root page, it consistently returns when I once again import sheet pins.
Is there any way to edit the schematic database? How can I get rid of that bogus label?
Have you tried: Schematic Editor / Edit / Find for your obstinate label? My best guess is that it’s still somewhere on the hierarchical sheet, and the “cleanup function”(I have not used that myself yet) is only visible when KiCad thinks there is really something to clean up. KiCad has quite a lot of menu’s that dynamically change their content.
As a last resort, you can open KiCad’s files in a text editor, or even do a grep over the whole project. It’s a bit tricky to edit (delete) things via a text editor, so make sure you have a backup. But just seeing in a text editor the context in which a name is used can sometimes already help.
You are a genius. The ‘Find’ function did the trick. The offending net was found on the schematic page, but it had somehow yeeted out into nowhere land - far outside of the page limits. No idea how that happened.