I guess I’m a sucker for punishment, because this year I decided to re-draw the Hackaday Supercon badge again into KiCad. Last year I called it finished when I had a correct schematic. This year, I went all-out and made a complete KiCad project.
The issue is that the badge designer doesn’t use KiCad. However, so many people in the community only use KiCad, it seems useful to redraw the project to make it more widely accessible. We get the PCB design file which KiCad imports without issue. The task is to recreate the schematics and make everything consistent between them and the PCB.
This year the badge circuit was quite simple, so I didn’t hesitate to just redraw the schematic entirely, and thus didn’t wrestle again with the backwards flow of nets from PCB to schematics like I did last year.
A couple of mile-high observations from this year. In v8 of KiCad I’m seeing more and more convergence of editing concepts between the four main tools: schematics, symbols, PCB, and footprints. I also keep forgetting to open the Properties editor window which gives more and more group editing options that aren’t available from the properties editor hotkey.
You can read the detailed hiccups in the writeup below, which might be helpful for people doing reverse engineering.
and the previous year’s task: