Duplicate and mirror silkscreen

Layout
1

Hi, I’m laying out a PCB with a lot of through-hole test points. I’d like to have labels for them on BOTH the top and bottom silk (so I can probe the board from either side and know what I’m doing. I’ve tried following the instructions at Flip text and put on F silk and B silk? which say:

Select text
Press “Ctrl-D” (duplicate)
Press “F”
Click mouse

but I can’t get it to work. If I select the text and use the right-click menu I can copy and paste, but the pasted text always ends up a long way away from the copied text (completely off the PCB and the sheet.)

I’m using Kicad 5.15 on Linux Mint. Thank you and thanks to bobc for the original advice (even though it doesn’t work for me)

2

Maybe if you centre the PCB on the sheet (default red borders and title block are hard to see) the flip operation might not take the text so far away?

3

Thanks Ken, but I’ve seen the copied text end up way off the sheet. It’s not defaulting to the “middle of the sheet” or the “origin of the grid” - I can’t see any pattern yet to where it ends up.

4

The “Duplicate” function from the drop-down menu seems to work perfectly when used on a component, and it this case the component involved was entirely on the top silk (it’s a “high voltage” warming symbol)

5

I suppose a workaround would be to edit the footprint and specify that the reference should go on both silk layers…

6

You would need to add user text fields with %R as the text as the footprint file format is not allowed to have multiple reference entries in it.

My experiments for this topic resulted in 3 bug reports:

1 Like
7

Thank you Rene! I just tried that in the footprint editor and it works.

Just so anyone else reading this knows, when you type “%R” into the text box when editing the footprint, the footprint DISPLAYS “REF**” but it looks right when I drop it onto a PCB.

Thank you both, again, for your help!

8

It displays whatever the reference field currently displays. (REF** is just the default value KiCad uses for the reference, the default value for the value is the footprint name)

9

OK, thank you for clearing that up. I got a bit confused by the second bug you reported - that made it sound like I wouldn’t be able to make two REF** labels.

10

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.