I think that much of what you are saying is valid; that is to prioritize decoupling placement as a second step immediately after placing the ICs. Newbies might place the bypassing as an afterthought. That is often problematic because the decoupling capacitors are likely to end up too far away from the IC.
But I do question the observation that you seem to be using through hole capacitors (and everything else). I have been doing electronics for 50-60 years (depending upon how you think about it) and these days I cannot think of ANY advantage to through hole bypass capacitors as compared to SMT in MOST designs. Smaller size, lower cost, lower parasitic inductance, easier rework. I do most of my own soldering…
I feel the same way, but this has strayed from the topic of how to use KiCAD (the purpose of the forum), and the forum administrators seem to want to close the thread quickly. However, it is common knowledge that beginners often don’t notice, so it’s better not to close it so quickly.
This is purely my personal impression, but the main purpose of the forum seems to be to address the lack of documentation (there are no examples that are easy for everyone to understand, and only outdated explanations of single functions). It would be nice if it could be a place to discuss solutions people are trying to achieve using Kicad and how to improve the flow to their final goal, but at present, the people who are closing the forum threads early seem to be focused only on clearing up misunderstandings in the user guide, and it seems like the forum is run in a way that doesn’t allow for much other than bug reports. This is unfortunate for all Kicad users.
However, even if a beginner in circuit design or printed circuit board design encounters a great tool like KiCad and has a question within a few months of using it, they will likely be told, “That’s a general question in electronic circuit and board design, so please don’t discuss it here.” Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if we discussed examples of how to achieve our goals more quickly using KiCad and left the results as a history on the web?
Ideally, bug reports and suspicious behavior should be consolidated into issues, and feature improvements should not be made on an ad hoc basis, but the improvement process, along with the process itself, should be openly recorded in issues. Doing so seems like it would extend the life of the tool, including the background to the considerations. What do you think?
Look through the forum to find that there are planty of questions not being bug report (bugs are not reported here).
Do you distinguish KiCad use related questions and PCB design related questions?
How to assign specific footprint to decoupling capacitor - it is KiCad question.
How many and what capacitance decoupling capacitors to use, where to place them at PCB - these all are electronic and PCB design questions and not KiCad questions.
Way to distinguish - do the question will look the same at any other PCB design program forum?
The question of what this Forum is here for has been discussed at length amongst Moderator and Admins . . . and also with the Forum owners.
Also I think it’s pretty clear from the " About the . . . . category" threads, originally posted to each of the categories, what each Category is for . . . for further clarification please read this FAQ
Do you really think so? Don’t you think that how to extract only the decoupling capacitors from the schematic and transfer them to the layout on the board is a tip when using a tool called KiCad? I think the topic should be about how to do that workflow in KiCAD.
I think it’s a good tool to warn if the decoupling capacitor is not close to VDD.
The threads that were quickly closed were about the number of layers on the board and the placement of decoupling capacitors, but aren’t those questions based on experience? Experts would be able to give advice on how to efficiently place them near the VDD of an IC in KiCAD, so would it be better to close the thread immediately?
It is KiCad related question but it was not asked before in this thread, nor in the previous one.
If you have all decoupling capacitors in schematic corner then you have no problem to extract only them.
If you have at the same time opened schematic and PCB and some symbols selected at schematic then hotkey P at PCB collects their footprints together to move them where you want.
I think it’s too much to ask beginners to do this. Don’t see the wood for the trees. I think you should give examples of what the ultimate goal is and what the means are, but aren’t the main advice currently focused on keyboard operations in the Actions reference in the documentation?
If think it’s about how to use “P”, isn’t it just a matter of reading https://docs.kicad.org/ carefully? Is the main purpose of the people who are giving advice on how to use it other than bugs to look up how to use key operations on behalf of beginners who don’t know where in the documentation it says key operations?
But these are electronic and not KiCad information and there are other forums focused on such questions - see EEVblog for example.
It just so happens that I’ve answered many times questions that aren’t directly related to KiCad itself so addressing your “you should” to me is not not very justified, I think.
In this previous thread it also was me to write some useful (in my opinion) information.
But the forum’s policy is against it so I am trying to keep such posts to minimum.
Decoupling capacitors were discussed here not only once. For example in this thread:
For example, do you think that not placing a decoupling capacitor near VDD is not such a big problem? Ideally, depending on the type of IC, a warning or automatic placement would be displayed if the capacitor is not placed near the power supply, but currently placement is left to personal judgment. Do you think this is a pointless discussion that cannot be resolved with KiCAD’s EDA tools?
No, even in its current state, you should be able to improve it by changing the procedure for using the tool, so I think you should try that. That’s the starting point of my new topic as a continuation of this closed topic, right?
At least tama tried to drive the original discussion toward KiCad. It may be so-so, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t have fitted in the original discussion and made it more related to KiCad. If all these experienced KiCad users wouldn’t have answered in this thread and complained, I would have been happy. Staying silent would have made this thread to wither away naturally, now it’s becoming empty disputation.
To close or not a thread is always a dilemma without an answer. Sometimes it happens prematurely, sometimes too late. Please, everyone, give everyone some slack.