Hello,
i’m new to kicad and i find it a very good software but i have a problem that it prevent me to use it.
While i’m working sometimes kicad loose the symbol library and i found with ?? in my project ( see image for more details ) .
The libraries are located on a network drive, same for the project.
S.o. Windows 10
Kicad V5.1.2_2
same here, make footprint make symbol save everything close kicad and next time only footprint survived.
i have tried to use kicad few times since start, and each time everything is different but everything still doesnt work. ok kicad is free in usd but it is very expensive in users time doing debuging and thats just bad.
Do you already understand how library management works? Have you read Library management in KiCad version 5 ?
A tip for the future: set kicad to english before making a screenshot if you intent to post it on an international forum (In the preferences menu of the main kicad window)
Is your network drive always mounted on the same drive i.e. Y: everytime? Doesn’t Windows prefer server paths these days rather than drive letters which can change across mounts?
The network drive is always mounted on the same letter, and is remounted at each reboot automatically, however the probem came out even on the same “work session”, not only after a reboot or a file reopening
no, i’m going to read it now
Just for the kicks try to save your libs to the local drive and check if the same behavior persists. If this seems to fix your troubles then head over to the bugtracker and report the problems with regards to using network drives for the location of libraries.
Also update to 5.1.4 if you did not already do that.
Next time the library becomes inaccessible try opening the file with an editor using the path name to see if it’s inaccessible there too. Also what kind of NAS do you have? Some of those economy consumer NAS devices have low resource limits like simultaneous open files which is understandable given that they have only a low power micro in them.
Consumer NAS also use old and unmaintained Linux OS with old buggy Samba versions
Turn out that my technician use Library Loader to manage the libraries, he also found out that the issue happen when he add some simbol to that library via Library Loader ( that makes a single large library so it change the file already loaded by kicad).
If we reopen the project all the symbols are loaded correctly, so i guess that once we finished importing the libraries we need the issue will not affect our use of kicad.
You could check if there is a feature request for a “reload libraries” button. If not make one with your usecase detailed.
Aside from the reload problem you may wish to establish a regime for library modification. Something like only one account is allowed to modify the library and other users have only read access. Otherwise some day you might lose updates due to simultaneous modification, if file locking (don’t know if the Windows port uses this) doesn’t prevent you.
Why not use version control for libs then? This allows either merging or locking automatically (locking requires a centralized version control system, merging is typically the solution for decentralized systems)
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