Hi there.
Yes I am a developer but not software, embedded hardware which means I do a lot of programming for non-PC processors and microcontrollers and a lot of PCB designing. This why I like KiCad.
So I did look into BOOST libraries and the version I have is 1.60… maybe. It seems hard to determine since I never actually installed them specifically. I have almost given up on the latest version of KiCad on my Win7 64b PC but I thought I would try to use winbuilder to build KiCad myself. I got it from GitHub. I did it last time in 2015 and it worked fine. This time it seems to have problems with cmake recognizing the version of Python. (I found that the version of BOOST in the winbuilder files is 1.6, which confuses me since that link indicates 1.57 or lower only works.)
problems… problems…
Anyways, I Just tried Kicad on my Win7 32 bit PC and there is no problem with it. This means that this stable version does not work on Win7 64 bit PCs. That’s OK for now. I’ll just use the Win10 tablet for a while until the developers fix this.
Thanks for all the help everybody. I think I should just leave this for those developing KiCad. My skillset doesn’t really include PC software development. Unless someone knows a sure way to replace the boost libraries on a win7 64b PC. haha…
I just waded through launchpad and could not find a bug highlighting the the 1.59 issue, so 1.60 may also be incompatible. I suggest you raise your own bug and label it something like pcbnew crahes on opening, possible problem with boost 1.60 on Win 7 64, so that the developers can become aware
As a data point… I run KiCAD nightlies (no stables) on 4 Win7 64bit machines, at least no instant crashes (all have dedicated GPUs installed though - as this came up on the bugtracker thread).
I have found solution on this problem on other similar topic on this forum.
I have removed Python 3.5 and removed PATH, PYTHONHOME from my environments variables.
Now both PCB New and PCB Footprint editor opens :).
Non standard Python installations strike again.
I wonder if it is possible for KiCad to be made more robust without doing a complete Python install in the same directory
I used KiCad successfully about a year ago and tried today and both pcbnew and the footprint editor crash before every opening as in this thread. I am a windows developer and when I go to Debug in VS2015, I get this exception: “Unhandled exception at 0x000000000C2D9FC2 (nvoglv64.dll) in kicad.exe: 0xC000041D: An unhandled exception was encountered during a user callback.”
Googling yields very little except that this is an open gl dl.
My environment is Windows 10 x64 (Lenovo W540) with an NVidia graphics card. Note, it did seem to work in the past which is odd.
I think there is a bug here with either the NVidia OpenGL driver or your use of it. I was able to work around the problem by going into the NVida OpenGL settings and explicitly have the program use the Intel integrated graphics card and not NVidia as per below. NVidia drivers are completely up-to-date as of 6-Jan-2017 and are at version 353.82. I am not sure how one submits a bug, but here you have it. If you would like any more system info, let me know.
I think only a few developers monitor this list, it’s mainly users. The place to report bugs, especially crashes like this, is https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad see link at top right “report a bug”.
Unfortunately, the new graphics have opened another avenue of obscure failures, so I am sure we would all appreciate as much as help as we can get nailing these problems. The Intel drivers seem to have caused most problems for KiCad and some other OS projects.
Jim
One thing KiCad lacks is the ability to select OpenGL features it uses.
You are in a better position to work with the developers to isolate any KiCad OpenGL bug than most of us, so as @bobc suggested, report the bug on Launchpad and take it from there
Just another thing to look as - have you edited/adjusted your fp-lib-table in any way? I accidentally added a character to the beginning once and it caused exactly the same behaviour.
This is an ancient thread. You never need to “run as administrator”
I have noticed crashes in Nightlies when I open an old project pcbnew from the schematic window. This is always solved by opening the pcb first and then the schematic from pcbnew. After saving there is no more trouble.
I am sorry to drag this thread up again but I am having this exact problem and it is now 2021 so several versions after this issue was reported. I have the same. It’s random, machine restarts do not help. As soon as I try to start PCB new kicad crashes. I have tried opening it from the schematic and from the project manager but it’s the same really.
It happens occasionally on my home machine but not lately but I am having bad problems on my work computer that unfortunately I do not have much control over as it is locked into the corporate IT system so I don’t have admin rights. Could that be part of the problem?
Well, exact problem does not mean same cause when it comes to a crash. For that reason reading through 45 comments to get to the current is probably not helpful. Please start a new thread with the proper version info.
