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)
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?
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.
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