Hello everyone,
I ran into a situation today which I was able to correct before sending my PCB out.
As I was running through my checks on a PCB, I noticed that I had a named net connected to nothing (not technically nothing, it was connected to 1 pad of an AND gate). When I went to the schematic, I confirmed that this net was only connected to 1 pin on the AND gate. I quickly connected the net to another pin on a uC and the problem was averted.
But I was worried because I only caught this net issue by looking at the routing of the nets. And something so trivial was not caught until the very last minute.
Is there some sort of built-in utility to KiCAD (or plugin) that will allow the user to scan through the named nets and check if there is only 1 connection?
Indeed. Learn to use both ERC (In the schematic) and DRC (On the PCB). These are very important tools in KiCad.
1 Like
Thank you. The DRC is really helpful especially when specifying constraints for the board.
But when I ran the DRC, it didn’t catch the issue.
I might be missing something but the ERC also did not catch the issue. I am getting alot of message about pins not being connected (even though it clearly is) or Input Power pin not driven by output power pin. I think that I have a setting wrong some where.
Did you run ERC before or after you fixed it 
I’m not sure what is happening here. Can you post a screenshot of such a connection?
I also think there was a recent bug in this, but I’m not sure. What is your KiCad version? (Or just update to V8.0.1)
It’s not a wrong setting. It’s the most misunderstood ERC Error message. You fix it by adding PWR_FLAG symbols to the right net. Read the manual for how this works. If you don’t like this, you can also disable this specific ERC violation.
Hello Paul, Sorry for the delay, will be taking a second look at this guy soon. Having some other issue related to gerbers and such on my board from advanced circuits.
I ran the ERC before and after I implemented the fix. I intentionally left it un connected to see if it would catch it. I tried scrolling through all of the other messages but I never saw a marker for it being not connected on the net.
Fix all those issues.
When you have many error messages, then it becomes hard to wade through the list, and all too easy to miss a few important ones. So start with a few easy ones, Decide what you want to do with it (either fix it or suppress it) and continue down the list until none are left.
And if it then still does not work, post a (simplified) version of your project here so we can have a look at it. (And also state which is the offending net / track or other issue.)