New to kicad, I’ve been using altium at work and EasyEDA at home for small projects. I’m in my final year at uni and I’m doing a project which I requires a PCB to be designed. Kicad has more features than easyEDA which is why I’m going down that route
Anyway, point of this thread. I have created a project, we’ll call it “Display_HMI” for reference. I’m using the hierarchy system in kicad for this project as it’ll be quite dense and will be easier to manage and read on multiple sheets.
The project created a schematic and PCB file, as usual. The “Display_HMI.sch” serves as my root sheet, it will show the interconnections between the other sheets. Using the “Create hierarchal sheet” tool I created schematics for power, display, peripherals, memory, and a page for each unit of the MCU. Each one of these, apart from the MCU ones, created a .sch file and a .pro file for each sheet I created under the root schematic.
Except for the MCU ones. This is where I’m lost. The MCU has 4 units, I created a sheet for each one, we’ll call them “MCU_Power.sch”, “MCU_A.sch”, “MCU_B.sch”, “MCU_C.sch”. I can open all 4 of these sheets with no issue. Kicad clearly knows there a link between all of these, however a .pro file was only created for “MCU_A” and “MCU_B”.
Why was no .pro file created for these two sheets like every other sheet I’ve created?
Also, why do no other schematics show up apart from the “Display_HMI.sch” under the “Display_HMI.pro” tree?
The project is work related and has sensitive naming schemes in it, hence the adjustment to some names.
Below is a screenshot of the project folder sorted by type. You can see a schematic file exists for every schematic I created using the “Create hierarchal sheet” tool, but a .pro file doesn’t exist for every one.
A project has a single .PRO file, regardless of the number of. SCH files.
It appears you have made multiple Projects. That is not necessary. Recovering from this may be a bit painful. Make a backup of everything.
I’d suggest you make a new project. Have a main sheet with multiple subsheets. Populate the subsheets by importing the contents of the various existing files you just saved.
Nope, I only ever created a single project, “Display_HMI”, which created a .pro, .sch, and .kicad_pcb file. All other files were created automatically when I created a sheet using the “create hierarchal sheet” tool.
For example, on the “Display_HMI.sch” I clicked the “create hierarchal sheet” button. Drew the box. Named the sheet “Power Supply” and the file “Power_Supply”. The file name was left without the “.sch” because it is not necessary as kicad will add this to the name if the user does not do it manually.
This then created a “Power_Supply.sch” and “Power_Supply.pro” file itself. I did not create these manually.
I figured this was normal, until it did not create a .pro file for 2 of the sheets I created. Now I’m not so sure
I’m not super concerned about this because I can access all sch just fine, and the main project file seems to know about all the relevant connections between schematics.
Being new to kicad, I’m just not sure if this is normal behaviour or not.
Separate question. Is V5.99 a nightly build/ beta?
Is it better than 5.1?
I’ve heard that V6 is being released soon too!
When opening individial .sch-files from outside KiCad, a .pro file will be created with the same name as the .sch file. At least for 5.1.7 under Windows. Perhaps that is what happened? The extra .pro files are ignored when you open the correct .pro file so they should not create any problems.
