By default, each new component has the following properties: reference, value, footprint, datasheet. Now if you actually get as far as building stuff you need to generate a bill of materials which would need fields like Part_Number, Distributor, Price Break etc. I haven’t found an option to edit default settings. So for each new design I have to go and add those fields manually for eeeeeevery single component. The fact that the table in the property form has the most morphidite editing logic doesn’t help the matter (instead of editing the table directly you have to click on each line in the table and then go to the bottom right corner of the form where you can actually change values). Is there a way to add additional default properties which would be automatically added to each new component? I’m hoping that the existing ones are not hard coded and may be can be edited?
eeschema->preferences->schematic editor options->default fields
Fantastic! Thanks! .
be aware that the parts in the libraries won’t get those fields until you edit them in the editor (and save those changes) - just in case you expect that once you populate that information in your schematic it would also appearing in other projects that load them from the libs.
Thanks! I was not really counting on that. There is really no way to reliably cross reference parts from different projects. I was just looking for a way to expedite data entry. However, since you mentioned it, there really should be a single property for a multi-unit components.
What do you mean by that?
I mean, if I have a component which contain 36 identical units I have to enter 36 times number of the fields worth of identical information for a single component. I don’t know, maybe for BOM it is sufficient to have only one unit contain all the fields, but it doesn’t help me when I click on a symbol in the schematic to see its properties or quickly pull up a data sheet for it. All those property fields should belong to a component not a unit or at the very least be automatically copied to the rest of the units.
You might also be interested in KiField, which lets you edit the fields as a spreadsheet.
You just do:
kifield -g -x MyProject.sch -i MyProject.xlsx
Then you edit the MyProject.xlsx spreadsheet. Then when you’re done, do:
kifield -x MyProject.xlsx -i MyProject.sch
to insert the information back into the schematic. (Be sure to back up the schematic first.)
You can also use KiField directly on a library and put the fields in there so they are always populated when you place a component in a schematic.
Not to go off on a tangent, but isn’t it doing things backwards? If I understand it correctly, you basically create a BOM by hand to import it back into component properties… to create a BOM…
Perhaps. I guess it’s a matter of personal preference. An advantage of KiField with the -g option is that if you have multiple instances of a component with the same value and footprint, they are grouped into one row, and so you only have to specify the part number once.
You can use KiField and add the info into a spreadsheet that gets imported into the schematic or library. Or you can do that directly in the schematic or library editors by clicking on each individual part (did you get them all?), creating the fields (did you use the same field name for each part?) and setting their values in the dialog boxes (did you set the correct value for each field in each part?). Your choice.