Hello,
Just started with Kicad, and I am a bit stuck. I started a new schematic with the MCU of my choice, STM32F446VETx, and the component is so huge that it takes up the entire page (A4). Tried the component editor, this allows to add pins and change labels etc, but not the outline of the entire component. What am I doing wrong?
I suspect this has an easy solution, but so far I have been unable to find it.
Stefan
something is wrong, can you check that your page is A4?
Screenshot?
Where did you get this symbol from?
component is from this github repo:
Downloaded and merged with those in Library/Application Support/kicad
(yes, I’m on OSX)
I assume the outline is a rectangle.
move your mouse pointer over one corner and press g for grab.
You should be able to edit this rectangle.
By the way: It might be a good idea to change the symbols to a multi unit symbol.
This way you have more freedom when creating your schematic.
If you meant you want to change the border of the page:
You can do that under file->page settings in the schematic editor. There you should be able to change the page size to for example A3.
Your pin-names are very long. I would delete all the information except the pin name (Example delete everything except PB1)
To make my point clear: here some of my mcu symbols. (One of them is a stm32f4 maybe you can use it as a starting point.)
tera_processors.lib (9.7 KB)
It’s in the KiCad standard library… I think maybe they need to revise their rules! Symbols like this are a bit useless.
I think the symbol library needs more moderators. There are currently over 100 pull requests open. Maybe somebody already changed the symbol but it never got merged.
How did it get accepted in the first place? And you should take a look at the BGA216 symbol :shudder:
In the short term, I would use a larger paper size.
I would design my own symbol. Takes half an hour and you get a usable symbol out of that.
Who says that the symbol is correct otherwise. (If it looks bad maybe it even has bugs like wrong pin numbers, …)
Thanks Rene.
Grab kind of works, but all I can do is position the whole rectangle, not resize it. But I will have a look into you library and consider making this a multi unit symbol or just a smaller with just the pin functions I intend to assign.
BTW, thanks everyone for the nice and quick answers!
Stefan
Yes, the symbol is huge!
There are some solutions, none of them easy and quick.
I see nothing technical wrong with the screenshoot.
That just because it has tons of text.
On my MCU symbols I just use “PA0, PA1, PA2,…” Thats all I need.
The stm32 lib was autogenerated from STM data https://github.com/ObKo/stm32-librarygen/tree/master/stm32-librarygen
So I guess it has a good chance of being correct, but probably has not been checked by a human. Whatever the source, careful checking of symbols is always advised.
I have also autogenerated my own version of the STM32 symbol library.
It contains two versions of symbols. A monolythinc one and a block based one, that has banks separated.
Let me know if it is useful.
Here is a section of a schematic using the bank block version of an STM32 symbol:
That is me. This was my procedure with the PCB design tools I was using a few incarnations ago. I have not yet used KiCAD on a project containing a uC. (Unless you count the one board that included one of the smaller Arduino modules. The Arduino world has already gutted the pin names to make nearly-meaningless short designators like “PB0” thru “PB7”, etc.) It has been said before (and not only from me):
I don’t have measurements to support the idea but I’d say that a symbol or footprint which looks bad, has a higher probability of containing more serious errors. Processors in general - from the basic PIC 8-bit chips on up - are a drafting challenge because they have oh-so-many pins with oh-so-similar names.
Dale
Thanks. Will consider this for the future, but I have already made a smaller version with just plain port names.
BTW, figured out it was easier for me to modify the text than to use the part editor. I hope this is not frowned upon…
That’s how i do a lot of things. Some actions are not really efficient using the graphical interface.
Some of us even use python scripts for some tasks. (generating footprints, generating on board antennas, …)
That’s also why most like the human readable file format(s) of KiCAD, easily changeable by hand/script. 
Here is a tip: I use kipart to create stm32 mcu symbols. It supports the pinout csv file exported from stm32cubemx application. It will generate each port as a separate symbol. It will use only the function you have selected for the pin name. So you can have a symbol like this:
