Kicad 5.99 Duplicate Reference Designators

[Slawek]

I’m not sure how or when this came about in my design, but most (not all) of my footprints have two reference designators on the Silkscreen later. The value of one is static, ex. “RN2”, and the other is “${REFERENCE}”.

Has anyone seen this and know how to programmatically fix it? (I have hundreds of parts)

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Application: KiCad PCB Editor (64-bit)

Version: (5.99.0-10650-gfdcc49d3ee), release build

Libraries:
	wxWidgets 3.1.5
	libcurl/7.74.0-DEV Schannel zlib/1.2.11

Platform: Windows 10 (build 19044), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW

Build Info:
	Date: May 28 2021 08:59:27
	wxWidgets: 3.1.5 (wchar_t,STL containers)
	Boost: 1.75.0
	OCC: 7.5.0
	Curl: 7.74.0-DEV
	ngspice: 34
	Compiler: Visual C++ 1928 without C++ ABI

Build settings:
	KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
	KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
	KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=ON
	KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
	KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=ON
	KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
	KICAD_USE_OCC=ON
	KICAD_SPICE=ON

[retiredfeline]

Maybe one of the refdes is on the Fab layer? Try turning off the display of those layers. Those are usually not sent to the factory.

[Slawek]

These are the only layers I have enabled in the first screenshot.

These are the properties of both labels.

[jmk]

It may have been a bug. The problem is your 5.99 is seven months old, and many, many updates have occurred since.
That 5.99 is now 6.0.0-rc2

[Slawek]

I know I took on the risk of using a beta build to design my board in the first place but it seemed pretty stable to me overall back then. If this is the only bug that surfaces I’m fine with that. I’ll just delete the extra RefDes manually as I align each one.

Dare I ask if the transition from a build like mine to 6.0 RC’s is safe to do on the fly?

[jmk]

@Slawek

Dare I ask if the transition from a build like mine to 6.0 RC’s is safe to do on the fly?

Should be, just make a backup first.
I, and many others, have been updating regularly… I’ve never had a problem.

Maybe update first before you manually delete? The problem might go away?

[davidsrsb]

6.0 can be expected any day now.
Be careful that updating to 6.0 rc creates some new directory points under “6.0”, leaving some “5.99”

[Slawek]

I updated to 6.0.0-rc2 and the duplicate reference designators are still there. Frankly, I didn’t expect them to go away because they were introduced to the PCB file at some point (parts added lately don’t have the duplicates).

Still need some help/advice.

I can only manually delete the ones that contain the value ${REFERENCE}. I noticed that the parts that still have a single RefDes are have static values so at least that matches up. I’ve done raw file hacking before (changed annular ring on all vias) in the past, and am thinking about doing it again to delete all the ${REFERENCE} variants of the RefDes.

[Slawek]

After looking into this further I noticed that the Fab reference designator were missing for every part with duplicates so I probably inadvertently moved the original Fab values to the Silkscreen layer using the “Edit Text and Graphic Properties” tool.

Here’s a sed command I used to fix it.

sed -e '/REFERENCE/ s/SilkS/Fab/' MyPCB.kicad_pcb > MyPCB.kicad_pcb_fixed

Thanks for everyone’s willingness to help me.