This is good advice. I’ll make sure I follow that. Didn’t cross my mind at all. I’ll make sure I backup all before…
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The library manager is available form the symbol editor. No need to open eeschema.
The symbol editor does not touch any of your project files so no danger here. (This is what @Sprig wanted to inform you about.)
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Ah. I had forgotten about accessing it from the symbol editor, since my usual workflow is to access the library editors and general project settings from Eeshema and PCBNew.
Yet another way to skin the cat. Though using a blank project helps protect fumble fingers like mine from clicking the wrong toolbar button in the project window…
My migration to V5 was long enough ago, using the nightlies, that I can’t remember exactly what my concerns were, but the process was not well documented at that point in time.
Thank you SembazuruCDE! Your instructions were very clear and well organized. My conversion to V5 went far smoother than I expected with all my normal V4 symbols and footprints being replaced with the equivalent V5 parts and all the custom ones being used from my personal libraries. The results were, my schematic and PCB layouts appeared identical to the way I left them in V4. Couldn’t be happier.
For fun, I took a look at my board with the 3D viewer and found it was not showing anything except the PCB itself. I thought that odd, since in V4 I could see more than half of my V4 components in 3D. Looking at the components, I saw the 3D maps were pointing to valid WRL files, but just not showing up. By selecting the equivalent STEP file, the 3D views were restored. Not sure what the difference was, but like I said, 3D rendering is not a high priority for me.
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Thank you for your kind words and your feedback testing my procedure. I spent several hours carefully thinking through and modifying what I though at first would be just a couple of steps… I hadn’t actually walked myself through with a live exercise of converting. So, again, thank you for being my guinea pig. 
Check to make sure your 3D viewer is actually being told to render objects. Under “Display Options” in the 3D viewer Preferences menu:
One thing about the 3D model settings, and why in the supplied 3D objects you see both a .wrl and a .step for each filename. The .wrl can create a pretty rendering with colors similar to real life (if designed properly), but because it is a mesh format it doesn’t work well for integration into MCAD workflows. (Aligning holes in housing to components on the board.) The .step files work really well for MCAD workflows, but doesn’t really support colors, so will render as a matte gray object.
If you decide to use 3D objects, the suggested method is to have both a pretty .wrl and a CAD accurate .step, both with the same filename. Have the 3D object pointer in the footprint definition pointing to the .wrl for pretty pictures in the 3D viewer. The STEP output will automatically replace the .wrl extension with .step when collecting objects for output.
@maui’s StepUp plugin (for FreeCAD) is also expecting this configuration both for import (to FreeCAD) and export (from FreeCAD). Read here about it:
I’m no expert in StepUp, nor in FreeCAD, but I have successfully created a .wrl with close to real colors from a manufacturer’s .step file. I don’t know if I did it correctly, but it involved tediously selecting faces and assigning colors. Then mapping the assigned colors to StepUp’s suggestions for textures when exporting from FreeCAD to KiCad.
Check the file path very closely. We renamed most of the 3d models so assigning the step file probably fixed the file path for you. (you could probably also re assign the wrl file using the same method as you used for assigning the step file and you will get the same result.)
If you want your old projects to still render the 3d models then you would need to have the version 4 3d model library installed in parallel to the version 5 lib.
Hi all,
I upgraded a few weeks ago to 5.0 stable from 4.0.7 (under a Win10 x64 virtual machine) and had the small issues described in this post.
After getting help from @Rene and @pedro i ended up in a clean install of KiCad 5. Since i am relatively new to KiCad i didnt have many projects yet so I preferred to edit them to use 5.0 libraries (to do so, i deleted the cache library inside each project and corrected the “unknown symbol” markers in the schematics, then i repeated the CvPcb process, re-generated the netlist and voila i had my PCB updated seamlessly (almost no re-routing required! Wow!).
After being able again to generate Gerber files for my PCB maker i had a look at the 3d rendering and found that a good number of components (mainly connectors) was not shown.
I could not figure why, since i used mainly the default libraries (and i know that my 3rd party libraries do not include 3d models, grrrr…). I wonder if it is because of wrong scaling of the part or if i missed a name mismatch between footprint and 3d model.
I hope that helps
Do not do that! It might break your project. Use the normal remapping procedure. (It might result in a newly created library called project_name-rescue. But this is not a problem. It is how it is intended to work.)
If you then want to point your symbols to a new library you can use “tools -> Edit symbol library references”
Hi Rene,
Yes i remember you warned against doing so.
At that time, it was the only way i found to ensure getting rid of the v4 legacy.
I gave your suggestion a quick try and the tool returned a message like “there are no symbols to rescue in this project”.
So far i didn’t have the time to try again to verify if i missed something in the quick test i mentioned earlier, i promise i will try again and post the results.
You started the symbol rescue dialog. in the same menu there should be a “symbol library reference editor” (I am not 100% certain about the exact wording as i run a nightly build with slightly differing user interface)
Another point about 3D objects. The footprint itself has a pointer to the filepath of the intended 3D object (much like the symbol in the schematic has a pointer to the footprint). Because when laying out a board the used footprints are embedded in the pcb file, changing the 3D object filename in the library footprint won’t be reflected on any board until you reload the footprints on a board from the library. That is one of the reasons for doing step #12 in my procedure, above.
But, also, the 3D library included with KiCad doesn’t actually have a 3D object for every footprint in the included library. Generating 3D objects is a labor intensive task and our librarians are all volunteers. It is unfortunate, but reasonable, that they haven’t gotten to everything. And for a feature that isn’t critical to the functioning of designing circuit boards for most workflows, an incomplete 3D object library isn’t a reason to hold up the release.
There are actually some footprints that have 3D object settings, but the 3D object files don’t actually exist. This is (probably) done because the librarians know what the filename of the 3D object should be so they put it into the footprint. Once the object files are created (and vetted) they only need to add them to the 3D library instead of also having to update the footprint libraries.
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A good day to everybody, and big thanks for your support!
I tried again importing a v4 project in my clean v5 installation and yes, the symbol remap tool you mentioned started automatically. There is a dedicated “Remap symbols” menu item just under the Symbol Rescue line; once the Remap Symbols tool has been run, the corresponding menu item gets disabled.
I looked closely into the contents of the modules and modules\packages3d folder and noticed that:
- the 3d files have mostly the same name of their corresponding footprint, but some have a slightly different name, like 1x05 instead of 01x05 for some connectors. This can be adjusted in the footprint properties dialog.**
- not all footprints have the 3d counterpart, probably its just a matter of patience.
I’ve updated from 4.07 to 5.0 without any problem. I have just backed up the old Kicad directory and created new and copied only project and old libraries I want to use in the future. Then I just followed @SembazuruCDE guide and all libraries are loaded fine. After I uninstalled the 4.07 I have removed the PPAs just in case. After that I have installed v5 from PPA and then cloned all templates/symbols/3Ds/footprints from Github and then set global variables.
I am now at point 11.2 of @SembazuruCDE guide and I plan to update the footprints using “Edit Symbol Fields” command. This tool is awesome as it allows you to copy/paste the values of footprints. I think I will be finished for this project in under an hour. But I’ll do that tomorrow.
My dir structure looks like below. I plan to just copy/paste that on all machines
Kicad/
- libraries
- local
- downloaded
- footprints
- packages3D
- symbols
- templates
- official
- footprints
- packages3D
- symbols
- templates
- local
- projects
- project1
- project2
- project…
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Just to let you know guys I finally fully upgraded my project to Kicad 5. I copied the project on 3 different Linux machines and works perfectly on all 3 slightly different versions on Linux Mint.
On 2 other machines that I copied the project to I just uninstalled the Kicad v4 and deleted local directories including ~/.config/Kicad and managed to just copy that from original computer without any problems after instaling v5. Directories were the same so it went smoothly. I am just completed upgrading all footprints using Update PCB from Schematic. I love that functionality. I’ll sleep on it and order prototype board just to be sure before I go into production.
Thank you all…
Not sure how to do this. Linux MINT 18.3
I’m not familiar with Linux. Maybe try googling how to modify environment variables in Mint?
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Unless you explicitly set them in Linux, you don’t need this step.
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Thank you! I will keep that in mind.
I confirm this. I have ver 5 now installed on 4 machines linux Mint 18.3/19 and all running smoothly by just following above install procedures without setting enviro variables and just copying library/project installation dirs.
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