It would be useful if I was able to lock particular schematic components, in particular, the reference designator.
For example, say I have a project that I am about to produce a second PCB revision, and the documentation for revision 1 exists. The documentation refers to, eg, CN1 and JP3. I would like to be able to ‘lock’ these designators so when I do a local or global annotation they don’t get reassigned.
I don’t care (and would actually like) things like R and C to be renumbered, but some things I would like to keep ‘sticky’ without having to go back and manually change them.
Indeed, however ‘keep existing’ keeps annotations for everything that is not new (blank). I could annotate just the new symbols, but then I could end up with a design that has, say R12 to R18 on a page, and my new symbols (on that page) end up being R34 and R35.
What I’m getting at is being able to re-annotate all symbols, both old (already annotated) and new (blank), except just a few symbols that I don’t want messed with.
Back in the day I used to annotate most things manually (showing my age), and I like grouping designators, such as R1xx for power supply, R2xx for the micro, R3xx for ethernet…
I also know that these days it is not a big issue and the reference desigators are only there so the pick-place machine knows what goes where.
I had an Idea about: Schematic Editor / Edit / Find and Replace, and then use it to “undo” the annotation for resistors and capacitors and then redo the annotation, but that dialog is quite limited at the moment.
I think I do like the idea of having an ability to lock some of the RefDes assignments, but I’m not sure if it’s useful enough for a feature request.
Certainly if I’m the only one with the wish it is not worth the extra complication (and programming effort), but I thought I’d put it out there and see.
Cheers, MM
We are only two of over 5000 forum members and who Knows how many Kicad users.
If you like the idea, go to gitlab (shortcut- Kicad Help / Report Bug), register if you are not already, then fill out the “New Issue”. Start the title “Feature Request” to make it easy for those sorting the problems.
Click on “Issues” in LH panel to see how others make reports and if you still have problems ask here.
EDIT: @mf_ibfeew wrote some instructions here on how to navigate GItlab reporting. Need to do a bit of scrolling.
