Hello i am using these screw connectors on my PCB. Their respective library names are screw terminals. However when I am trying to associate footprints to my symbols I am not able to find these. Can anyone tell me when which Designation of connectors will I find their .pretty/footprint files. I don’t want the generic pin header/socket footprint , I want the actual footprint for these screw terminals.
Also is there any search tab while associating footprints to the schematic to search among all the footprints.
For the schematic you have symbols for screw terminals:
Before you can assign Footprints you first have to know the pitch of your particular screw connector. It may be around 3.8mm, 5mm or 5.08mm (5 and 5.08 are almost interchangable for upto 3 pins, above that the deviation becomes too big).
For the PCB Footprints, hover over the connector you just put in the schematic and press f for Footprint, then [Select] to get to the Footprint Library browser
When searching for specific connector through the 40+ Libraries I often open the 3D viewer to get a quick overview of what a connector looks like. You can open the 3D viewer with the “capacitor” like Icon near the mouse cursor.
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There are way too many components out there for the official library to provide assets for all of them. You might find that your specific component simply is not yet in the library so you might need to create your own footprints for it.
If you do not care about 3D models you can make Footprints for such simple connectors yourself very easily with the Footprint Editor.
It has some nice wizards, where you just punch in some numbers for numbers of pads, pad size, hole size etc.
Making a custom footprint this way is even faster than searching through KiCad’s own Footprint libraries.
Without even knowing the pitch of your connector, I can not help further.
The thing I’d like to see most is to have a regular expression (like) search box in the Footprint Library browser, in the same way as there is for adding schematic symbols to Eeschema. With this you can have a quick overview of connectors with a certain pin count and pitch, which greatly narrows down the search.
So is there a search box for footprints?
Actually there is. It’s called CvPcb.
My previous attempt was randomly browsing through the “connector” libraries.
Your question reminded me of CvPcb, which is the “older” way of matching footprints with schematic symbols, accessed via:
Eeschema / Tools / Assign Footprints
CvPcb has some search filters, and instead of going to the “connector” libraries, it goes to the “TerminalBlock” libraries.
The TerminalBlock libraries have all kind of footprints with screw terminals, and I missed these completely when browsing through the “connector” libraries.
In CvPcb you can right click on a Footprint and then “View Footprint” to see the Footprint, and then in the Footprint Viewer, you can use the same capacitor like symbol for the 3D viewer, although there are not many Terminal Blocks with 3D models.
CvPcb is quite powerful, but not very intuitive to use, so read the manual for what you can do with it. The most important part are the 4 filter icons and the filter text box next to it.
For example, with these settings:
… you get a nice overview of (all ?) TerminalBlocks with a pitch of 5.00 and 5.08mm (or 5. “something other”, but they do not seem to exist)
The assign footprints tool (formerly known as cvpcb) is only one of the options on how to assign footprints to symbols. A detailed explanation of this whole process is found here: How can i assign a footprint to a symbol?
As always, good link to the correct part of the FAQ / manuals.
My direct response was for the question of a search function, and CvPcb is the only Footprint search and filter function I know in KiCad.
Edit:
I (accidentally) found another search box for Footprints.
In the Footprint editor there is a search box on top of list of libraries.
If you search there for:
terminal x03 P5
(with spaces between the search terms)
Then the list is narrowed down to 3 pin terminals with a pitch between 5 and 5.999mm.
You can not directly assign a found footprint from the Footprint Editor to the Footprint field of a schematic symbol, but the search function is useful, and once you got a complete name, you can:
Footprint Editor / File / Save as
And then copy the text string of the name, and paste it where you want it.
(P.S: this thread was the inspiration for my new Avatar.)
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Thanks Paulvdh I also found it in MEtzconnect
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