Thankyou I will give it a try. The schematic shows that there is a footprint assigned to each header but I know its wrong or it would work. I do not think I will turn any safety features off for a while even low voltage parts aren’t free. The fact that all these wonderfull tools failsafe a circuit for correct operation is well worth the learning of the software by itself. I have dabbled in spice but I am not sure I want to go that far for a while unless it has gotten much more user friendly. One thing at a time for now, but its cool. Thanks again for the info and the hot key
Earlier in this tread I saw .step and .pretty mentioned.
The .step files are just for the 3D models and they are not necessary for KiCad, but just make the 3D view of the PCB look nice.
The .pretty are the folder names for the libraries for the footprints. (Footprints are the IC’s themself with the pads to solder them on).
If KiCad is installed normally, you should already have more then 120 of such libraries with probably a few thousand footprints in them. The files for the footprints themself have the extension “.kicad_mod”.
Reading, reading and … it is very hard to find in your text what is your actual problem.
Hi @Sillywan,
I’m pleased you are making headway with Kicad.
A further note to help clarify your posts in this thread to any of the readers (and no offence whatsoever is intended, just makes understanding much easier for silly old farts like me):
When you are writing about the Schematic side of your project use the schematic terms: eg. symbol, wire, pins, etc.
When writing about the PCB side, use the pcb terms: eg. footprints, tracks, pads, etc.
Cheers
As I see it, he’s a beginner with KiCad (and probably PCB design software in a general sense) and is struggling with the basic concepts of how all those different parts fit together. From that point of view you can’t expect a well defined question about a single sub subject.
To Sillywan, make notes, start with some small projects (less then 10 components) and do a few of those projects untill the workflow gets some foundation in your mind.
The FAQ mentioned earlier has many quite in depth articles about various topics in KiCad and many of those articles are worth reading.
Also, printing out this cheatsheet is a help in jogging your memory and learning to work quicker with KiCad:
Is a help but looking at 3) you see that it is written for KiCad V4.
I am sorry for not being clear as to where my problem is but really I am not sure where it began which is why I am starting over. I forget that most everyone here are actually working engineers. I am at a first grade level but I am learning fast now that I have a book and the newest software that are the same version. Thank you for the cheat sheet. I will gain what I can from it and see what works. I will take all advice I can receive at this time and I hope not to be a nuisance. My first lesson is pretty small, but I did botch it somehow and you are right by the time I redo it until I get it right so I can get to project 2 which will teach me something else (no I haven’t looked) I will have this part down for sure. Sorry again I will give you folks a break for a while during which I will get this down and find a new problem you can get me thru. You folks are awesome.
It’s OK,
we’ve all started with KiCad at some time in our past.
My start was with the “Getting started in KiCad” guide, and with it I got from the test schematic to a PCB in about one afternoon. It was a great help back then.
Unfortunately that document has not been updated after KiCad V4 and is quite seriously out of date.
I still have the intention of updateing it but progress keeps getting snagged behind various aspects of “life”.
I think you can learn much more from tutorials Rene pointed you 8 days ago.
Thank you everyone, I have downloaded the tutorials and I am reading on one now in between the book and those lessons. I rarely use the keyboard commands in any of my software. mostly because I dabble in so many working with my 3d printers and my mini mill. I kind of made a decision that since I am learning KiCad from the ground up to try and utilize the keyboard commands with this one. I pretty much rely on my mouse since windows happened. I thought Dos was the holy grail until 1993. I still think if they fixed the memory constraints and designed it for 64 bit modern systems it would have become what linux is. Now I am lazy and syntax dumb and I got to dig out of this fog and start learning to use the keyboard again. For me the race is over though, I only punch one clock now and its a ways to quitting time.
Have an awesome weekend everyone.
Freedos
But it’s really no competition with Linux. It’s useful for minimal systems on X86 hardware, used or things like BIOS updates and the like, and by ancient games enthusiasts.
But DOS and its ilk (DRDos PCDOS, etc) are not really operating systems in the the same way as say QDos on the QL, Minix, VMS, or Unix in all its derivative and clones. NT was and is the DOS rewrite, wrapping DOS inside a “real” OS, where its derivatives live on as the command line in Windows.
You got me here, I have absolutely no knowledge of linux. I get your point that NT is kind of the dos rewrite but all they really did was change windows to 32 bit. And since they had no choice but to write it they used what they had and put what would become 95 and dos together and solidified it early as it was for networking. By the time they decided they had finished 95 it had become the unstable trainwreck that it was. The first step away from syntax, a lot better than 3.11 but an expensive upgrade for such a buggy system. Anyway no love lost here for the microsoft folks. If I did not have a lifetime of software and the use there of I would have given up when they went to eight. I just know that you could play some awesome games in dos if you could write a decent auto exec bat file to make it fit in the dos memory constraint. 
Does anyone know how to find the preloaded libraries in KiCad, and get them to work?
The FAQ link should tell you everything you need to know. Without knowing the OS and Kicad Version number it’s hard to give any further advice.
After a week of trying and 30 emails from Carlos @ SnapEDA, I finally got the libraries loaded. Now I get the fun job of trying to download resistors and capacitors. then I can start on going through the tutorials to find out how this package works.
Or you take a step back. You might want to ask yourself if it is really the correct option to have a symbol/footprint specific for every resistor you want to use. The downside to this approach is that you fix at design time what exact part you want to use for the full lifetime of your device. This is a good idea for complex parts like ICs but i argue less so for simple parts like resistors.
After all what one typically cares about is that there is any resistor in place that fulfills a certain subset of electrical and mechanical parameters. So maybe thinking about passives in a more abstract manner might be beneficial. For example i have a symbol for 0805 resistors with a given tolerance and voltage hardness connected to my generic 0803 footprint (and another symbol for 0603 and one for 0402). And then i fill out the resistor value at design time which then fully specifies the parameter set that i use to order the part later on.
I can then for example choose the cheapest part that is available within the time available every time i make a production run without needing to change the schematic as i have an abstraction layer in between the parametric schematic and the distributor – in my case this abstraction layer is a simple excel sheet that maps the parameters or more precisely my house part number to a real component.
I can live with a single 0805 footprint for all resistors in 0805 package because i do low volume production where yield optimization is not worth the additional complexity. The footprint just needs to be good enough not to have too much issues for my process it does not need to ensure that i have less than 1ppm failure rates. So your specific needs might differ. (If you plan to handsolder or if you produce less than a few thousand boards then i would argue you can easily also live with a single footprint for all 0805 resistors) And for me the footprints in the official library are good enough (but i am biased here as i was the head of the library for quite some time).
Of course no matter what workflow you choose you will still need specialized footprints and symbols for more specialized components like certain shunt resistors.
Hey Rene, I am not sure if you remember me from a few weeks ago, but thanks again for all the resources and the help. Sir, I am an apprentice at best in Electronics. I know that I am a kindergarten student standing in the middle of a group of college grads. I am actually an “OLD” tube amp musician that had to learn how to care for his amp because they were not cheap. Even back then when you could find 600volt 20mfd capacitors. I have tried to understand how to use KiCad for a couple of months now. I am still having problems getting to the end of a project. “ALL” of my problems involve the symbol and footprint libraries. I can not wrap my head around the fact that something that has been made to be so crucial is so incomplete that you stand a better chance that there is no “FOOTPRINT” for your component than finding one. It is also the most confusing and hard to use part of the cad. I do not get why the footprint is so critical? An 8 pin chip is an 8 pin chip. The circuit won’t care if I put a CA3140 or a TL072 in the socket. If I were building boards for Spacex this might seem important, but when you are just a hobbyist trying to build a stomp box it seems like hours of useless work to find the one footprint that will work for the component you want to use. If it even exists. What I am saying sir is that there are more gremlins in these library systems than the rest of the cad put together for me so far.
I do not suppose there is a way to just draw the circuit without all this confusing symbol / footprint stuff that creates more problems than it solves. Is KiCad too powerful for me to use? I am currently trying to get through a project from the book KiCad like a pro. I am going line by line and still having problems in the same place I was having them before buying the book. FOOTPRINTS AND SYMBOLS. Is this an issue? It is apparent that I am not the only one struggling to get a handle on this. I’ll keep reading and working with it. Eventually it will work I hope. Thanks for your time, I KNOW “YOU” ARE BUSY. Can’t we just go back to tubes? They work far better than transistors. Sound better too:thinking:. Have a wonderful day.
Well not really. Chips come in many shapes and sizes. For an 8 pin chip it can come in DIP-8 (wide or normal or well a non standard width), SOIC-8 (any number of body widths available and variations like TSOP, HTSOP, …) DFN and QFN (an even larger variation of body sizes), LGA and BGA and of course any number of non standardized packages.
And this is nothing where KiCad can do anything. It is just a fact that the industry has a huge variation of possible packages even for the simplest devices.
I however suspect that you are mostly interested in DIP style packages. For that there is only one footprint lib to care about. It is called Package_DIP. The 8 pin packages available are the DIP-8_W7.62mm and DIP-8_W10.16mm (check your components datasheet which width you will need. Most digital or analog chips use the W7.62mm variant but there is no guarantee for that).
This only holds true if the two chips are pin compatible. If they are then yes you can just draw a generic symbol that can represent both of them. As far as i can tell both of these are dual OPAs. I seem to remember that there is a generic symbol for dual OPAs in the device lib. If there is one double check that the pin numbers in the symbol agree with what your indented components use (again sadly there is no global standard here. Some manufacturers use different numbering schemes. Again something where KiCad can do nothing.)
I understand, and you are right about the package I primarily work with is DIP. Thru hole type stuff. The surface mount devices are a bit beyond my visual capabilities. There are a couple of super simple little projects I would like to try but for the most part I am one of those, gonna have to have a drill file, kind of makers;-). Thanks for the clue to the package I am looking for. I know I have a ways to go, but it is fun and I am learning. You Rock Rene! Until next disaster, Rock on!
Have you ever considered buying a stereo microscope?
It is amazing how much detail you see through a EUR300 microscope. Even with coarse THT components, you can see exactly what the flux does to the wetting and lots of other details. I postponed buying one for years, but when I finally bought one and saw the difference I realized I should have done it years earlier.
I also find SMT much easier to work with then THT:
- You don’t have to drill holes.
- You can use the other side of the PCB for GND plane or routing signals.
- No turning of the PCB for soldering. Components don’t fall off.
- You don’t have to cut the leads to length.
A disadvantage of SMT (especially resistors and capacitors) is that those ceramic packages are very brittle, and may break if the PCB is bent (For example when using a screwdriver to fix wires in connectors.