I hereby certify that I am not simply asking someone else to design a footprint for me.
This is an auto-generated message that is in place on the “footprints” section of the KiCad.info forum. If I remove it and ask for a footprint to be designed anyway, I understand that I will be subject to forum members telling me to go design my own footprint or referring me to a 3rd party footprint site.
I am designing a board that will have a COTS daughtercard plug in. The daughtercard has multiple connectors (same connector part number, just multiple instances of it). I already have a footprint for a single connector, so in theory the footprint for the overall daughtercard would just have multiple instances of the single connector footprints (spaced appropriately for the daughtercard dimensions).
Is there an easy way to do this in KiCad? Create a new footprint that is comprised of multiple subfootprints?
I think that works for the most part, except the pin numbers copy over directly, so I end up having to rename every pin Jn.m. Gets old after a few hundred pins.
KiCad works so that you have to choose between 1 symbol / 1 footprint, and several symbols / several footprints, but you have to have 1 footprint per 1 symbol.
Using one footprint is enticing, but it may be problematic when you click on the board to select something. In v6 it’s better than it was in v5 because now you can for example lock the footprint and deselect locked items in the selection filter. In v5 it was really difficult not to accidentally select a footprint which took large space when other board items were between items of that footprint (which may happen often with a footprint with several connectors).
If you choose to have several footprints, you could group them together so that they are selected and moved together. But currently there’s no easy way to reuse that combination in another design – you have to position them again. Or you can copy them together from an old design and then bypass the normal schematic → PCB update mechanism and relink the symbol/footprint combinations using the reference designators.
Are the pins in the continuous number order? It’s really easy to (re)number consecutive pads. Use Renumber Pads on one pad, give the start number, click and hold the mouse button, drag over the line of pads. Move the mouse over the last pad on empty area, release the button, double click.