Migrating from KiCad4 to KiCad5.0 and 5.1

Edit:
After writing the post below I cloned:

paul@dualcore:~/projects/kicad$ git clone GitHub - rusefi/rusefi: rusefi - GPL internal combustion engine control unit
A bit later I found:
/home/paul/projects/kicad/rusefi/hardware/frankenstein/merge/rebuild.bat

with the remark:

rem Let’s wipe out all local libraries. Frankenstein does not have it’s own libraries!

This suggests you should be able to recover the schematic symbols from the default libraries if you follow Rene’s tutorial, but also look into the rebuild.bat file. It copies libraries and does other things.

I also found that “frankenstein” is apprently an old version and “frankenso” is the continuation
I think this is about my limit for how far I want to go for this project.


From your video it is clear you do not have much experience with KiCad.
I noticed (@ 0:52) you did not know what PROJECTNAME.pro means. It is the KiCad Project file. You should always open the project file in the KiCad project manager, and open schematic and pcb programs from there.

I am not sure what happens if you want to convert a KiCad V4 project to V5 without having the project manager open. Experienced KiCad users are so used to this step that @Rene_Poschl only mentiones it very briefly in his excellent remapping tutorial.

@ 3:10 you are looking at boxes with question marks. This means the conversion has gone wrong, and anything following that is pretty much useless.

Does your project have a [projectnam]-cache.lib? This library is important for conversions from KiCad V4 to V5, but because of the @#$%^&* resolution of your youtube video I could not see the directory listing.

From the screenshot below it looks like the schematic you are looking at is already for KiCad V5.

I thought about having a look at that project, and after a bit of clicking found:
https://github.com/rusefi/rusefi/tree/master/hardware
but there are so many sub projects there that I don’t know which one to pick.
I looked at a few projects there (frankso, frankenstein and CJ125_board), and neither of those have the [project]-cache.lib file.
That file is pretty important, because in it are all the schematic symbols. Without that file KiCad gets confused and can only show blank boxes with question marks in the schematic.
Your best hope is to install the old libraries (see Rene’s tutorial) before attempting the conversion from V4 to V5.