An engineering project as a concept may include multiple independent schematics.
Does a Kicad project support this? (Other than using sheets as workaround)
The thing is:
There is no “New schema” button.
But.
If you place a non-empty schema, outside Kicad, in the project folder it will show up in Kicad.
If you edit that schema with Eeschema it will get it’s own *.pro and *-cache.lib files, looking like some sort of sub-project. (You may have to refresh your project).
The sub-projects are handled differently from the original project.
If you open Eeschema in a sub-project there will be two new buttons:
- “Open schematic” which opens any other schematic in the folder, and
- “New schematic” which creates a new schematic with a new sub-project.
As a bonus (I hope) a symbol library created specific to a sub-project is automatically present in the other projects.
Is it supposed to work like this? Am I missing something?
Thanks.
A KiCAD project is for one gerber plot.
That gerber plot can contain several boards on it, if you manage to keep them apart, usually via hierarchical sheets for the schematics and via mousbites/etc. for the fabricated boards.
The KiCAD project folders contain all necessary bits for that gerber plot.
If you need different independent gerber plots for an engineering project (for independent pcbs), you better start putting KiCAD project folders into a master folder for that engineering project.
TL;DR: it’s not supposed to work how you think atmo.
Thanks, that makes sense to me. It also means Kicad is more pcb-centric than Eagle, which I will have to take into account.
Unless corrected, I will assume the answer to my question is: no.
Still I would appreciate it if someone could explain to me the weird behavior of Kicad I described above.
Why the sub-projects? Why the elusive “New schematic” button?
(Yes, things like that bug me )
You double clicked on a .sch file in the KiCAD main window which wasn’t the project schematic, right?
This starts EEschema in stand-alone-mode. It’s then decoupled from PCBnew and you can do things like open and close single schematic files. It’s useful for importing bits of schematic files into other schematics currently:
But the connection between PCBnew and EEschema is gone then.
Clicking on a part in EEschema and getting the focus of PCBnew to the same part for example.
This only works for the project files.
Yes. Because the toolbar button only opens the project schematic.
So, Kicad is playing Windows Explorer for non project files.
Depending on the context of the schematic (project or non-project) it will open Eeschema in normal- or stand-alone mode.
And Eeschema has more leeway when in stand-alone mode, like creating new schematics.
It is also Eeschema that wraps a newly created or edited schema in project files.
(Not sure why this should happen, but that’s for another topic).
)