Hello! I’m pretty new to kicad and pcb design. I designed a schematic, generated a netlist, and loaded it up into the pcb design window. However, now I would like to connect pins to some of the footprints of my components for testing purposes. I placed some pins on the board. However, kicad won’t allow me to draw a trace connecting the component footprints to the pins (I’m guessing because the pins were never specified in the schematic so kicad thinks they shouldn’t be connected?) Is there a way I can force the connection between a footprint and the pin I placed? Please let me know and thank you!
The absolute easiest way to handle this is to place in the schematic a test point symbol and in the PCB associate a test point footprint of your choice.
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Of course you can draw traces on PCB without a schematic (or with a schematic and no footprint).
Simply select the Layer to draw the trace on and draw it… I do this pretty much everyday as I most often use a hand-drawn paper/pencil schematic. Maybe half the time I make the schematic in Kicad but, only if drinking enough black coffee.
The netlist defines what pins of each component should connect to each other. This way pcbnew can tell you about mistakes (whether something is not connected, or something that is connected shouldn’t be). If you add components in PCB view that are not on the schematic (and thus not in the netlist) the pins of those components will default to “none” for the nets they should be part of.
As others mentioned, it is cleaner to include test points on the schematic so the entire design is consistent.
However if you truly need to just add a quick header for testing, and dont intend to leave it as part of the design, you can click individual pads of footprints, and edit them (press “E”) and manually change the net association. Change the net on each pin of the temporary footprint to match the pin you are trying to connect to (you can see their net name by either zooming in close, or editing those pins to see what net they are on).
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This is the best way so that you have them documented. You can tell the router to allow DRC violations, but that is a poor second choice here.
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