I was getting an error attempting to add a new symbol in the schematic editor of Kicad V5. Screenshot attached. Cancelling this dialog resulted in an empty Choose Symbol dialog.
All settings were at their fresh install defaults.
Old projects (from 4.0.7) seemed to load fine and I could add new symbols to them.
After re-downloading and running a fresh install on 29 Jul (via this forum I’ve seen other wxWidgets related errors resolved this way), the wxWidgets dialog no longer shows, but the empty Choose Symbol dialog persists.
I have also tried deleting and recreating a new project to no avail.
As before, no changes to default paths. KICAD_SYMBOL_DIR is correctly set to “C:\Program Files\KiCad\share\kicad\library” and all global libraries existing in this folder are set to active.
No. I’ve seen a few suggestions to fix the issue by re-downloading and reinstalling, which I did, and this has stopped the dialog from coming up, as mentioned previously, but the underlying issue of not being able to view any symbols in the Choose Symbol dialog remains.
It’s as if only the dialog has been masked by downloading and reinstalling.
I’ve searched the forum but it looks like this issue is peculiar to me, so either I’m doing something stupid (I’ll freely admit it’s not unlikely!), or a specific sequence of operations has lead to this.
As I say, existing projects still work fine. It’s only on creating a new project that I cannot seem to add new symbols despite all default settings indicating that I should be able to.
I think in all the cases where people have been unable to load any components, it is because kiCad had not been able to load any library files, because the config the user has set up which “looks ok” is not actually valid, often for some subtle reason.
I don’t think there has ever been any bug which causes libraries to sometimes not load, I guess it’s possible. Anyway, if you have library problems, the place to start is with the library table.
My machine has an about 4 year install of Windoze7 on it. For the ‘most’ part it plays fairly nice with ‘most’ programs; but there seem to be some days when it wants to misbehave.
Even after a Re-Boot KiCad, will not launch the add new symbol window when mouse clicking on the right menu bar.
The calendar has a few more days on it, which means that I now have the data to download the most recent stable.
Interesting. When I add a new environment variable called KICAD_SYS_SYMBOL_DIR and point this to the same folder as pointed to by KICAD_SYMBOL_DIR I am able to see what appears to be a partial list of the available global libs (zetex.lib fails to load). There are still a good portion of the active items missing though, and it doesn’t explain why existing projects work fine without adding the above variable.
It looks like your symbol table is borked, like you have v5 table with some v4 libraries. I would just delete what is there in the table and add all the ones you want.
My existing projects do have the cache lib, but when opening v4 projects, v5 asks to remap to the new symbols “…KiCad will attempt to map the existing symbols to use the new symbol library table…”, which appears to complete successfully, so I figured it was therefore using all the new global symbols that I’ve used in the schematic (plus whatever project specific ones I’ve set up).
I’m going to try a more careful delete/reinstall and see where I get to.
v4 file format did not include information about which lib holds a specific symbol. The first symbol with the given name was taken meaning you either needed to make sure symbol names are unique over all libs or you needed to take care of the library priority.
Remapping does not try to replace the symbols in your old project with new ones. It tries to find the same symbols in your current setup and adds the information in which lib it is found to the schematic file. If it can not find some symbol in the new lib setup it will start the so called rescue process (meaning your symbol will be copied from the cache lib into the rescue lib.)
The remap process therefore needs a valid cache lib to work (otherwise it can not compare the symbol to symbols in your libs to determine which one the correct one is to take.) And also possibly access to the same libs with which the original project was designed. (otherwise you will just end up with your symbols rescued instead of living inside your libraries)
Thanks for the clarification. It looks like rescue libs have been set up in my case.
I have just reinstalled kicad, this time making sure to remove all kicad folders in C:\Users\ …\AppData. This time it has worked and I’m able to access the new symbols.
I guess this means the few v4 projects I ported to v5 while it was broken will need to be re-done.
I am having trouble with Kicad 5.0.0.1 Symbol Library in Eschema. I updated my 4.x setup to 5.0x recently and can’t access the symbol library files.
In my Preferences/Configure Paths I have KICAD_SYMBOL_DIR set to /Library/Application Support/kicad/library - which seems correct. Next when I am in Eeschema and check Preferences/Manage Symbol Libraries I see all the Global Libraries as apparently present. For example Nickname ‘actel’ is checked as Active, and the Library path is defined as $(KICAD_SYMBOL_DIR)/actel.lib - but this won’t load, nor do ANY of the other nicknames.
So at this point I am thinking the variable “$(KICAD_CYMBOL_DIR)” may be the problem so I then edited the path to “/Library/Application Support/kicad/library” and now that opens in my symbols in Eeschema.
So either the variable is supposed to be renamed when I ‘fix’ the paths in Preferences/Configure Paths or somehow that variable is not being defined wherever Kicad stores the definitions.
I will keep looking, but am hoping someone will have a simple answer to this issue, otherwise I see pasting in the “/Library/Application Support/kicad/library” 72 times in the Symbol Libraries Global paths…
Thanks!
Might it be that you had a late nightly running instead of the stable version of kicad 4? This would explain why there is a atmel lib (such a lib does not exist in version 5)
You might want to delete the sym-lib-table and fp-lib-table files found in your config directory and let kicad setup its defaults.
Using the library managers you can add more than one lib at a time. Leftclick on on lib and shift plus leftclick on another lib (everything in between will also be selected) For finer control use crtl plus leftclick.
