This would be how I would do this:
On Edit: Clarification
He wants it the other way round. The potis are outside the pcb. they connect to the pcb via the connector.
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I happen to have a quirky part on the board that I last designed. So, I know this works, even if it is unusual. In my schematic I have a part with pins that are not-connected and a footprint without pins (but does have holes…LOL).
Instead of going through the trouble of creating footprints without pins, I simply did not assign a footprint to the resistors. The netlist and ERC in PcbNew worked fine.
A bit unintuitive in my mind. (If i look at this part of the schematic without context i assume the potis are on the pcb.) The suggestion by @dchisholm seems to work better. (Specialized symbols the show the poti and connector.)
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I agree. But this took zero extra effort on my part.
Extra text on the drawings could clarify the intent.
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Only problem is the BOM for that approach… one symbol can’t stand for 2 different parts, the connector AND the poti.
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These should convey enough information and also allow for good BOM handling.
On Edit: WHOOPS! I’m not fixing it even though I see it now… LOL…
Yea, I know, replying to my own thread. But, looking at the boxes above gave me an idea!
It would be possible to design one schematic, having two boards. Then the project could be cloned to a different name. Perhaps, Project_MainPcb.pro and Project_Panel.pro.
Each actual board could be worked on separately.
Yes, it requires some manual editing of P/L and BOM. Not the kind of thing you want to do day-in and day-out in a large enterprise but workable at a small scale.
Dale
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It’s quite possible to draft a schematic in KiCAD where an entire PC board is represented by a simple rectangle, and show the connections to other components - switches, potentiometers, batteries, other assemblies, etc. Unfortunately, KiCAD doesn’t have any way to tell us that (for example) Subassemblies A, B and C are all part of Assembly X, which in turn is the major component of Product P.
Dale
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I took a big break from this but now I’m back at it 
I’m thinking I’ll be fine with the approach of having both connectors and pots/jacks in the schema. Things to note:
- Typically there’s gonna be panel wiring, like wiring ground between all the pots and jacks and just one ground cable to the pcb.
Ok, so follow up question. I have something like this now:
where I will probably line up the connectors on the pcb later in a row. But how do I unassign or ignore the jack in the footprint selection? I mean, I don’t want it in the netlist do I? Do I have to manually delete it? What if I then need to reiterate the schematic?
Is there any way to unassign in this view:
And if I assign with wrong number of pads I get this error message, should I not care?
