How is PcbNew Supposed to Handle Footprints with Update PCB from schematic?

I hereby certify that I am not simply asking someone else to design a footprint for me.

^^^LOL …

I have a project where I had 3, out of 6 connectors , with ~95 total parts on the PCB, refuse to just stay in place.

I had to keep existing footprints when doing the update so I could properly swap in and place the footprints.

I tried updating the footprints before the update, but that tactic did not work.

I did not try using CvPcb, because the footprint was defined in the symbol.

I have completely revamped my library system and file locations, but the other 92 behaving parts were also part of this change.

Application: KiCad
Version: 5.1.10-88a1d61d58~90~ubuntu20.04.1, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.4
libcurl/7.68.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1f zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.7 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.21.0 (+libidn2/2.2.0) libssh/0.9.3/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.40.0 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Linux 5.4.0-80-generic x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK
Build Info:
wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 3.24
Boost: 1.71.0
OpenCASCADE Technology: 7.3.0
Curl: 7.68.0
Compiler: GCC 9.3.0 with C++ ABI 1013

Build settings:
USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=OFF
USE_WX_OVERLAY=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=ON
KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
KICAD_USE_OCE=OFF
KICAD_USE_OCC=ON
KICAD_SPICE=ON

Anyone have any ideas?

refuse to just stay in place

What exactly do you mean by that? Could you perhaps include a before and after the “Update from schematic” pictures?

This may be a case where eeschema detected the changes and Pcbnew did NOT place the new conn in the location of the prior conn.

I can’t recite the rules for this case, but I’m not surprised at the behavior. I’m also not aware of a fix. It seems you need to place the new connector again.

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Something detected some change, and PcbNew did not want to play nice with the issue.

I’m just afraid that I may have made the issue worse by not knowing how the current order of steps in the operation should be done.

If the location of a footprint is changed when doing the update it usually means the old symbol was deleted and another one inserted to replace it. Some details about the process are here: Update PCB from Schematic's match methods.

Did you have proper reference designators in both schematic and pcb? If yes, you can use them when doing the update.

2 Likes

Well…

At some point in time KiCad allowed me to alter the Value field, to an actual value for some parts with an actual value; 10K for example.

Thanks for the link!

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