I was trying to load the Digikey library and KiCad crashed. Now most footprint libraries are showing nothing in them. See below for resistor_THT for example.
I tried closing and reopening as well as rebooting. I also looked at the paths and they all seem fine.
Ideas?
Click the IC Icon with the “L” in it and/or click on one of the libraries names in the left pane.
On Edit: KiCad can also be re-installed.
Thanks I tried the basic stuff but no go - will have to try a reinstall.
Have you checked off of the KiCad main form under Preferences | Manage Footprint Libraries …
Make sure there are actually ‘some_name.pretty’ files present AND have a tick to their left.
Meaning exactly? --> “: node5:”
Got it. Yep, that thing does not exist indeed, unless he/she/it creates one.
…and does the proper steps to point it at “it”.
Now that I would consider part of the proper process of creation as in creation for KiCad.
Check the library in the footprint editor.
Do you get any error reported when opening the footprint editor? Does the footprint editor show anything in that library?
Where on the disk does kicad think the library is located (check the library manager) and is it really there?
Thanks much folks - I just went out of town so wasn’t able to look - the whole project was created by importing an Eagle project that was called node5. It had been working until the crash I mentioned, then I started getting the errors I described above. I tried a different machine with a fresh install of KiCad and it worked fine, so I think something got corrupted with the install; I will try a fresh install on that computer when I return.
One additional question to the above - all of the footprints are referencing “node5”…I did a lot of work re-laying out the board and adding components already; if I change all of the node5 footprints to their native kicad counterparts (which should have identical size and properties), is there a way to have all of the footprints in the pcb layout change in place? (vs having to delete each one, reimport, and re place, which would be a GIANT pain)
Since *.sch files are plain text, any text editor with a find and replace feature will do.
Place at least one component as new component so you get the exact format you need.
The lines starting with ‘F 2 “footprint name” H nnnn nnnn nn nn nnnn a aaa’ you want.
n - numeric
a - alphanumeric
Component object structure
$Comp
L …
U …
P …
F 0 …
F 1 …
F 2 “footprint name” H nnnn nnnn nn nn nnnn a aaa
F 3 …
…
…
$EndComp
As long as you correctly replace the footprint names you are all good.
Please do not suggest editing with a text editor unless all kicad internal options are exhausted.
I would suggest the use of tools-> edit symbol library references for mass footprint updates.
@Waldo32 can you share the corrupted footprint library? I would guess repairing it might be the faster option here. (And it would be interesting to learn what broke as it could point to a bug of the eagle project importer.)
I don’t think it was the Eagle import that caused this problem.
What I find weird is:
If it were only a couple of libraries that were dorked up I’d lean more towards trying to fix the problem. But, given the information currently provided, I’d probably just re-install KiCad and start over.
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