KiCad freeze when i try to use Cvpcb editor

elektroschrott · September 19, 2017, 11:57am

Every time i want to open the Cvpcb-editor to assign footprints to my schematic symbols, the window openes, the idle-cursor appears and never go away. The application seems freezed and i only can terminate the whole KiCad
Same when search for parts. Selecting them from a library work, but search will never return and freezes KiCad also.

What’s wrong?
I’m using latest KiCad 4.0.7 on Windows 7 64-Bit, on HP ProBook 650G Core i5 with 8Gig RAM.

Sprig · September 19, 2017, 12:08pm

KiCad is looking to GitHub.

Let it “hang” for at least 1 minute, it might work fine if you wait long enough for it to “load” the information from the interwebs.

Hopefully this gets fixed the next time around.

elektroschrott · September 19, 2017, 12:17pm

Ok, i removed the KIGITHUB environment variable from the settings and the window now openes.
But there is an error message telling that KiCad can’t load some libs from Github. I hope i do not use them…
Would’nt it be even smarter to download them to local computer?

Rene_Poschl · September 19, 2017, 1:27pm

How to install local footprint libs by @bobc

elektroschrott · September 20, 2017, 7:20am

Thanks Rene for the hint. Unfortunately this does not work (for me). I could remove all libs, but in the next step to download them from github, it get an error message
I think my Problem is that i’m behind a Proxy server, which could not be set in Windows-Version of KiCad?!

Also, i do not get all the paths and library files and such. Maybe i’m confused… why is this so complicated? As far as i know until now, KiCad is written in Python and uses git to access the libs from Github. Git should be able to handle proxies, so why isn’t there an setting for it? I mean, we are on Version 4.x not 0.x beta ;-)))

Rene_Poschl · September 20, 2017, 8:31am

Kicad is written in c++ and it does not use git to access libs but it uses the github API to get zip archives of the lib. (This is how the github plugin works.)
But there also exists a python script that can download all footprint libs using git.

github.com

KiCad/kicad-library-utils/blob/master/download_pretty_libs.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#
# Download script for KiCad version 4 libraries. 
# KiCad version 5 does not need such a script as all footprint libs 
# are consolitated into one repository (https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-footprints)

from __future__ import print_function

import argparse
import sys
import re
import os
import subprocess
import platform

# Github address information
GITHUB_URL = "https://www.github.com/KiCad"
GITHUB_URL_SSH = "git@github.com:KiCad"
GITHUB_FP_LIB_TABLE = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/KiCad/kicad-library/master/template/fp-lib-table.for-github"

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This does not setup kicad though you need to add the downloaded libs manually using the footprint library wizard. (add local libs)

elektroschrott · September 20, 2017, 12:32pm

I see. Thanks for pointing this out.
I downloaded and execute the script, but it does not download anything either.
“Error loading fp-lib-table from gibhub”
The same proxy problem…

hermit · September 20, 2017, 2:45pm

I’ve had problems cloning from github recently and resorted to downloading zips directly. This wasn’t just Kicad stuff. I forget the error now.

elektroschrott · September 21, 2017, 6:15am

Yeah, i did it that way now, also. This is how:
1.) Download https://raw.githubusercontent.com/KiCad/kicad-library/master/template/fp-lib-table.for-github
2.) Write a little Shell-Script to build the libfile from the content. E.g. from the line
(lib (name Capacitors_SMD)(type KiCad)(uri ${KISYSMOD}/Capacitors_SMD.pretty)(options "")(descr "Capacitors, surface mount"))
i took “Capacitors_SMD.pretty”, prefixed it with “https://github.com/KiCad/” and also add suffix “/archive/master.zip”, i get this download-URL: “https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-library/Capacitors_SMD.pretty/archive/master.zip”.
3.) Download the archive using wget
4.) Extract the contents into a temporary directory (e.g. c:\temp) and rename the extracted directory from “Capacitors_SMD.pretty-master” to just “Capacitors_SMD.pretty”.
5.) After doing this for all files, i removed all folders in “C:\Program\KiCad\share\kicad\modules” and move the downloaded libs from temp-dir here.
6.) Last, put the content of this table “https://raw.githubusercontent.com/KiCad/kicad-library/master/template/fp-lib-table.for-pretty” into “%APPDATA%\Roaming\kicad\fp-lib-table”

After starting KiCad i could access all libs, and it now has the performance it expect. This also works behind a proxy