It’s not. It’s a representation of the actual net name/the physical connection.
I think mf_ibfeew thinks that, too, but expressed it from another viewpoint. It’s a graphical representation of something more fundamental, while in KiCad it’s an independent item which governs how other items are interpreted.
That’s a good one, and I think I have used labels that way myself. I can of course ask if there could be another way to achieve the same goal. Let’s say again, “OK, if I redraw a bit…” Could there be a way to automatically keep labels attached to wires and prevent naming problems etc., yet allow easily detaching and moving them freely if really wanted?
Why? To me it feels natural, I have thought that way long ago. Net can be a property of wires and pins, a label can be just visible element which shows that property.
I don’t think there’s any rush to change KiCad architecture or file formats. Maybe the current way is really better all things considered. What I really want is to identify the problems in the current way and possible solutions so that KiCad could be easier to use. I don’t really care how Eagle works, but the pressing problems with KiCad’s labels are:
- Because they are just text, KiCad doesn’t give much help for naming, renaming etc.
- KiCad doesn’t prevent or warn about problematic situations on the fly.
It seems for me more complicated. With labels you can simply swap pin assignment by moving labels. With pins - you can’t. You have to edit their nets with all danger of mistakes during edition. Then what with piece of wire that happened to be connected to that pin - gets new net automatically?
So may be only wires has assigned nets (there should be some way to see that net - the best will be without user action - just if wire has net assigned you see it - what with many segments wire - each one shows its net?). But if only wires then how you copy my TXD net from RS485 driver to microcontroller pin. You copy a piece of wire (with its property net set to it) and collect floating pieces of wires to be then connected to microcontroller pins. I have wires length from microcontroller do bus different then from RS485 driver and other devices as I place there pull-up resistors and sometimes 0R resistors. So manipulating with such pieces of wires would then need to fix their lenght.
For me natural is that net label defines the net and wire gets it from net label. I don’t see any need to improve anything in that. Maybe I’m just not a visionary.
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