Kicad is crashed when CVPcb icon is pressed

Software
1

i have drew schematic from scratch till Generate netlist, when running cvpcb the program crashes
with no error message
i am running on linux platform (ubuntu 14.4)

2

What is your KiCad version ? Please paste the info from the Help menu.
Please try running KiCad from a terminal, there might be more error messages (Ctrl+T, then type ā€œkicadā€ and press Enter).

3

Can you run kicad and get the version information from Help->About (click on the ā€˜Copy Infoā€™ button on the bottom). Are you using a prebuilt version or building and installing your own?

4

no error appears in terminal

758Ɨ125 13.3 KB

5

i do not remember exactly, but i think i was a prebuilt version

6

Any strange characters in directory or file names? There are some immediate crashes when KiCad comes across non Latin alphabets

7

there is no non latin alphabets :slight_smile:

8

Had the same problem, this is what i do:
(this is from user perspective)

OS: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
KiCad: 4.0.2-4+6225~38~ubuntu14.04.1-stable release build

  1. Replaced generic video driver with Nvidia one (iā€™m not sure if this had anything to do with this problem as, i did it for other reasons so i canā€™t pin it down)

  2. Always save schematic before running CVPcb

  3. Wait for everything in Eeschema to calm down before running CVPcb
    (in other words - donā€™t click, for example, Save button then immediately run CVPcb, wait for a second or to)

  4. After running CVPcb stay calm for couple of seconds, and allow it to run - donā€™t get hasty and start clicking around

This seems to work fine for me. Hope it helps

9

If you click around quickly, does it crash? If it does then that sounds like some kind of initialization problem, possibly due to multiple threads. If you could get it to crash and get a debug dump of all kicad threads to post on the bug tracker that would be helpful.

10

As always, when i tried to crash it - couldnā€™t do it, stable as a rock. Violated all my principles in previous post and everything works fine. Iā€™m not even sure the problem is in KiCad. I think there is some heavier processing when one opens the CVPcb so that might have destabilized the system.
By the way, how do i get a debug dump? ( is that a file created in /var/crash on Ubuntu system?)

11

Hmā€¦ Iā€™m on windows with BZR6608, but I noticed something odd lately, when the 3D view is open (somewhere burried under other windows) and I open a KiCAD module that needs/loads footprints it also seems to load the 3d shapes (again). The gpu fan spins up for a moment and the program is not reactive. I have to keep the 3D viewer closed for this not to happen.
Maybe something similar is happening under the hood for your Ubuntu build - as CVpcb is accessing the footprints when it loads?

12

I was looking at GitHub and there are recent changes to fix 3D view errors found by Coverity.
Actually one thing I find odd is that there doesnā€™t seem to be a 3D wrl cache. This causes issues moving projects between PCs. Footprints are copied into the kicad_pcb file, so always available.

13

Are all libraries local copies? Accessing GitHub on the fly is not a good idea

14

I was hoping to create a menu entry in 3DViewer to copy all VRML/X3D models to a directory within the current project but Iā€™m waiting for the new 3DViewer.

2 Likes