IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: Diode pins swapped in standard KiCad Libraries

Schematic
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Dear KiCad Users

This is simply to warn you that all diodes in KiCad’s standard libraries have seen their pin numbers swapped. This is to be in line with most other software and the IPC standard as well, which states that cathode should be pin 1. This work is courtesy of the newest librarian, Ricardo Crudo.

If you are using GitHub libraries directly, the only thing you will have left to do is update your schematic libraries to the latest revision of https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-library before continuing your work. If you have a local copy of the footprint repositories, then when you are ready you will be able to pull the changes for both the schematic libraries and the affected footprint libraries:

  1. Diodes_SMD.pretty KiCad/Diodes_SMD.pretty
  2. Diodes_ThroughHole.pretty KiCad/Diodes_ThroughHole.pretty
  3. LEDs.pretty https://github.com/KiCad/LEDs.pretty

Thank you for your understanding and sorry for the inconvenience.

Carl Poirier

2 Likes
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… you are not very good at reporting sources. But for reference, the announcement was also published on https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg18027.html where there is more discussion of this issue.

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I realize that a pin numbering preference for diodes is not present in the Kicad Library Convention document. I think that it is important to specify this.

“Are you sure you want to continue this old conversation?”
No, but it would be OK when this announcement is sticky during 2016.

4

Maybe this should be sticky.
I have learnt the hard way about designing symbols that don’t cause errors later