Happy New Year to all.
I have an issue that I hope someone can help me with. Relatively new to KICAD and schematic drawing so bear with me.
I have a project that I am working on that has several components and involves several boards and other loose components such as motors, relays etc.
I would like to draw this out using KICAD and I am experimenting with using a parent or root sheet with a child sheet inside this for each board on the project. So here are my questions
Lets say I have two boards that are connected together using a ribbon cable and a pin header on the board. How do I draw that and what symbols would I use?
Lets say that one of the loose components is a potentiometer and it connects to a main processing board via a single wire. This wire connects to a 20 pin header. I use alpha numeric identification on connectors so lets say it connects to A-10 (top row, 10th pin over). Do I put a flag on my loose component wiper pin and then an incoming flag on the Main board header?
Can I show the loose components in my parent sheet and somehow make those connections to the appropriate boards that they attach to? The loose components would also include several terminal strips (in/out)
I am attaching a picture of my connector on the main board and the potentiometers in another board for critique.
I am thinking this may not be the best way as the actual circuit board will also attach to these points
Thank you in advance for any help or advice you can give. Please show examples of proper methods.
You have to ask yourself: Am I making an assembly drawing or a schematic?
This seems to be somewhere in between.
KiCAD is not suitable for assembly drawings.
The basic philosophy is: one schematic = one PCB.
Hierachical sheets are powerful for partitioning schematics graphically for better understanding/readability, but not suitable for motherboard/daughterboards scenarios.
I can understand what you are saying but I also believe that KICAD may have the power to pull this off as well. If each sheet = a board = a schematic, what is the problem with drawing each of the schematics on the sheets and having them all in one directory or parent sheet? As well, they should be able to be connected within that parent sheet?
I just like to understand the inner workings of this powerful software and if it doesn’t work, that is okay. Just like to know …why?
I am imagining something similar to this:
Indeed. One project is one PCB.
There are several experiments on this forum of combining projects to have multiple PCB’s in a bigger project, and it seems to work (at least, it did when I tried in KiCad V5), but there is no official support for this. What works now, can break in the next KiCad version.
Best I know, it is simply lack of developers and revenue. KiCad is an Open Source project and (mostly) written by volunteers. They do a wonderful job, but there just is no budget to hire a few handfuls of programmers to implement all the features that would be nice to have in KiCad. And therefore the lead developers have to make hard choices of what is realistic to implement for the project, and in what order things can be added to be of most use to KiCad’s user base.
If there is a feature that is very important to you, you are willing to pay for it and it is also in line with the direction that the “lead” KiCad developers want for KiCad, there is a possibility to sponsor specific features. If you are interested in this, then contact: https://www.kipro-pcb.com/
And, as an Open Source program, you can also start tinkering yourself on the code, or try to find someone who can do that for you. More developers is more betterer ™. The code is on gitlab, you can always start with something small. If you want to work on mayor features though, I recommend you contact some of the KiCad developers before you start your endeavor. Patches and extensions will only be merged in if it fits with their vision. (But you can always fork it and maintain your own branch).
