presently I’m working on a series of projects which all contain an RF section consisting of a RF chip, a bunch of caps, inductors, micro-strip, socket etc. As always the geometrical arrangement on the board is critical for the RF performance and once optimized should not be changed. With ‘append’ I can attach the RF-section to a schematic, however already the annotation will be different (c5 is now c17 etc…). For the layout I have not figured at all how to group a set (section) of components/footprints for reuse in the next project, except a complete manual process which also requires a ‘translation’ of the indexes. Besides being cumbersome this is also quite error prone.
Any ideas how I can improve my working process? Your comments are much appreciated!
This is on some future roadmap for KiCAD, but currently not built-in.
As for your case… can you separate out the RF section and use it as a start point for the options/variations of those boards?
Essentially using it like an advanced template project… no better idea, sorry.
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Well another option is to use some sort of python scripting.
Maybe something similar is already around. I think a few penalizing scripts do exist. They could be a good starting point for this.