Very often, a project involves many components, but then when the board goes into production, not everything is assembled. Many different versions are made with the same PCB; this is almost standard practice. Now, how do I do it? I manually mark the components that don’t need to be assembled in the BOM and also in the PCB, so that the 3D version only shows the assembled component. I was wondering if KICAD can manage, starting from the schematic, the components that need to be assembled version by version (DNP only allows for one…), to automate a process that I currently do manually by correcting and/or turning off the unassembled component.
If you have it as two lines in BOM (from Eschema → Tools → Generate BOM, then select Edit tab), for example R1, R4, R10 - 0-ohm populate and R20, R40 - 0-ohm, DNP) then in right part of the window in DNP column you can tick / untick the whole line:
Yes, this is what I’m looking for, however I don’t know if the time it takes to set everything up in the schematic is justified… it seems very cumbersome to me.
I understand that comment . . . I think there is an abundance of functionality built into KiVar that it can be difficult to find what you need to do for your particular application.
I have one project that has 6 variants with different components fitted in some places, and others with components not fitted/fitted . . . so it does work. It can be controlled vias a drop down list of the variants which changed the Fit/Don’t fit status in the layout, from here you can get correct 3D CAD images of your board, then the change can be pushed back to the Schematic so you get correct Schematics and BOM.
I spent some time going through the examples supplied with KiVar and figured it out . . . if I did so can you.
But you are correct, it has to be worth your whie, it was 100% for me. I couldn’t do without it.
