I’m a KiCad newbie. Worked with EAGLE in the past. Under EAGLE I was used that the footprint appears in the board as soon as the symbol is dropped into the schematic. With KiCad it doesn’t seem so that it is.
I drew some rows of connectors and place them into the schematic. No net or wires drawn yet.
Switching to the board only shows an empty board.
I can recommend going through Getting Started in KiCad | 9.0 | English | Documentation | KiCad
There are a number of ways that KiCad is different from Eagle and this guide should clarify things
I have never used EAGLE and can hardly imagine how it works when you (making for example the new revision of PCB) do some changes at schematic and then other changes and then decide to restore a part of your previous modifications to state as in previous revision (state from what you started).
If during your modifications the footprints were also removed than where from EAGLE knows how to make everything at PCB back to previous state so as not to require you to re-design what has already been done.
For me it is a kind of program knowing better than me what I want (the feature of any program that I hate the most). I want to make any changes at PCB only when I know that I want to do it now after making my all decisions and some of them can be to get something to previous state.
“Update PCB from Schematic."
Maybe my words were a bit misleading. The footprints appear in the board window, but unplaced, of course, with air wires to the connected and maybe already placed components.
But looking into the docs that @craftyjon was citing, I already learnt, that a symbol first got to have a footprint assigned to and the schematic->board process is one to be triggered intentionally, it’s not an automatism in KiCad. And thanks, @3Dogs.
What I wonder is what happens if you delete the whole block from schematic (for example planning to solve some task differently - like replacing PN512 RFID with CR95HF RFID) and then from any reason decide that you are going in wrong direction and you decide to get back to previous solution, but you can’t just start once more from beginning as you don’t want to loose other modifications in schematic you have already done.
I suppose footprints don’t get back to their previous positions. OK repositioning is not a big problem, but what with all connections. Do the tracks at PCB when you position footprints on them get from footprint the right net at that moment or you have lot of errors making it easier to delete all tracks and route them once more.
I don’t plan to use Eagle. I’m just interested how it was solved there.
It is default KiCad workflow, but…
May be it will be useful to you.
I have never even opened a window to assign footprints at schematic because I use only symbols with already assigned footprints. I treat such solution as a kind of protecting myself against my own mistakes. So when I add 2n2/100V C0G 5% ceramic capacitor to schematic it gets at once 1206 case I have selected to be used and I don’t need to search each time I am using this capacitor what case should be used.
I understand. In my case here it was a 20 pin contact row which could be assigned horizontal, vertical sockets or pins.