No Plugin Icon in PCB Editor after installation (part 2)

Software
#1

Hi,
I posted this question before, but after some limited progress, I got tied up with other work and it fell off the radar, sorry. Original question is here:

No Plugin Icon in PCB Editor after installation

Unfortunately I don’t see a means of re-opening the question.

Anyway, I am back to having this problem again (with a new board). I definitely have the PCB Way plugin installed, I have wxpython installed, as seen in the image

wxpython installed
wxpython installed744×208 28.6 KB

Yet I still have no pcb way icon, which I presume I should be seeing in PCBNew, correct?

Thanks.

Using KiBuzzard
#2

Delete wxpython from pip, use system package like I suggested in my last comment in your previous thread.

#3

Deleting wxpython from my system in general doesn’t seem a viable fix, as it may well be a dependency for other software I use! I also never installed wxpython for the purpose of using the addons in Kicad, it was already there (I may have installed it a long time ago for something else, or perhaps it’s even a standard library as installed by my OS, Ubuntu 20.04). When you say use “system package” I presume you mean the OS standard install of wxpython, correct?

#4

Yes, system package is the one coming from apt, yum, or whatever your linux flavor package manager is.
If you have other software that needs wxpython you should use a virtualenv for it.

#5

I do a fair bit of Python programming, so it may well have been installed as part of another installation, not sure, but I don’t recall installing it manually, that’s for sure. I generally don’t operate virtual environments on this machine, it’s just faster/easier to keep all the clutter out when developing, and virtual environments come with their own complexities. Good for testing code though at times (different OS for example) but otherwise, no.

I use apt (or it’s deprecated apt-get). Wish the addons didn’t rely on dependencies outside of Kicad (all the rest of Kicad works just fine, just the addons that never show up, no doubt all broken for the same reason). Is my version of wxpython perhaps too new? I see you suggested a version 3, whereas I am running version 4

#6

The plugins are not made by KiCad, and what they do and what dependencies they have is of course in the hands of the developer of that individual plugin. If a plugin is buggy, you should do some searching to first find out and then follow their prefered bug reporting method.

I have also used my level 4 privileges to re-open your other topic.

1 Like
#7

Well, you don’t have a choice here. When one program needs one lib version and another needs a different version then you have to separate those environments, virtualenv is an easy way (but not the only way) to do it.

KiCad uses wxWidgets for GUI and wxPython for it’s own scripting shell. wxPython needs to match the wxWidgets version exactly and be compiled against it, KiCad needs to be compiled against both. When you install everything from same source (apt in this case) their mutual compatibility is guaranteed. When you add wxPython installed from somewhere else like pip things tend to break.

From your stack trace I see that you are trying to run InteractiveHtmlBom, that’s my plugin, it has 0 dependencies outside of KiCad. Yes, it uses wxPython, same as KiCad does.

I suggested python-wxgtk3.0, the 3.0 there refers to gtk version, not wxpython version. You will see that package itself will be version 4.xxx. If you installed KiCad from apt that package will be installed automatically so I think the only thing you have to do is remove wxpython from pip.

#8

Thanks for all the useful feedback. FYI, the problem I am having appears to not be specific to the addon I am currently trying to use/install. It doesn’t matter what addon I add to my Kicad system, none of them give me icons and/or work. So the WXPython issue must be a Kicad dependancy issue, not that the addon or plugin itself is dependent on it.

I am running Kicad under Ubuntu, and to be honest I don’t remember how I first installed it (snap? apt-get? PPA? etc.). It was several years ago that I installed Kicad, and I have it setup on my system (as with practically all my software) that it automatically updates whenever there is an update available. It currently states that it is running Kicad version 6.0.7 and wxWidgets 3.0.5.

I’ll try removing the wxpython as you have suggested (using pip) and see what happens.

Should I refer future comments back to the original forum query that I opened, now that you have reopened it?