[Not-Supported] How to manage multiple schematics and PCB in one project?

[tormyvancool]

it seems the project manager doesn’t manage quite well subprojects (unable to get back to the root one, when the child project it was opened).

So I’m wondering how to manage different schematics and PCBs belonging to one project.

I want to have each schematic separated by any other one.
As well as I want to have PCBs that are separated.

But all of them are belonging to a specific project

Any suggestion/hint?

[paulvdh]

At the moment this is not supported. KiCad only supports one PCB for each project, so yo have to create a new project for each PCB.

You can have multiple sheets in a schematic, but all sheets in a project form a single netlist.

[tormyvancool]

@paulvdh

At the moment this is not supported. KiCad only supports one PCB for each project, so yo have to create a new project for each PCB.

You can have multiple sheets in a schematic, but all sheets in a project form a single netlist.

Right. I see also in the 7.99 is not supported. I thought there was a kind of workaround

[paulvdh]

There have been experiments by several people (including myself) for this, and some times they seem to work, but then break in a later KiCad version.

Hierachical design with multiple PCBs

I once did an experiment in this direction, and it did seem to work. I first made a few projects in the same directory, each project with a schematic for one PCB. After that I made the “root” project, and used the schematic files from the other projects as hierarchical sheets in the “root” design. When working this way, then work on the schematic should always be done on the “root” project, to make sure annotation is unique for each component. Project specific libraries probably have to be ad…

KiCad also does not support “design blocks” yet. I am guessing that things like this will become supported in a few years time. Things like handling the Refdes and netlist is difficult and some way to handle duplicates must be implemented. On top of that, KiCad is still a relatively small project and there are several hundred feature requests open on gitlab. (Including a few for design blocks and multi pcb projects).

[bertrand_meneroud]

The plugin Kikit allow you to have : one schematic but multiple PCB. And use the plug in to separate each pcb to end up with one pcb per file for gerber and BOM production.

This is quite useful to have the lain board an its front panel in the same project and the same schematic.

[tormyvancool]

yes right but in my case there are several schematics and each one has its own PCB

[BlackCoffee]

FYI…

This is my approach to Kicad organization and, I set different Worksheet’s for PCB and Schematic’s. After setting the Worksheet, lines of text get created. Then, I edit the text to link a different worksheet.

I do it this way so each can have different Comments/Graphics/etc and retain them.

Example of Result showing similar layout but contains different text/titles/cmts…