Recently I’ve been training my colleagues in the ways of KiCad and ran into something that could be useful and that I’m thinking about implementing.
It’s simply a DRC on whether all the multi-parts are on schematic. The reason for this is that you want to terminate things like op-amps and unused logic sections. This would prevent multi-parts from being undiscovered and subsequently unterminated possibly through the whole design stage. Is there anything that’s wrong with this, or any suggestions?
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Sounds a good idea to me.
Where are you thinking of doing the DRC, in the SCH or at the NET stage, or in PCB ?
In EEschema’s DRC, though I haven’t given much thought into further stages…
I’ve seen unused parts of a quad nand get forgotten, with floating inputs as a result, back on a Visula job long ago.
What would be worse is if a multi part is drawn with a power block and it gets forgotten.
I haven’t used real multi-parts yet (except for simple 2 color LEDs).
What I couldn’t see or find was a way to import all parts in one go and then (if needed) move the other parts to other (hierarchical) sheets if necessary… or having some kind of temporary bin where the rest of the multipart get put and can be grabbed from as the current modus operandi seems pretty failure prone to me.
So a check if all are in the schematic would be very helpful indeed.
Just my 2 cents.
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I have designs that have 4 or 8 of the same multi-part IC type and end up with a table drawn on paper of which sub part goes where. Sometimes when I add a sub-part I do NOT want to use the next available Ref. It is very easy to make mistakes