I have a schematic that I would like to layout several ways for prototypes. On the first go round I just duplicated things in the schematic that I wanted to layout different ways. That is sub-optimal for well known reasons. The title of my post makes it sound like I would like to just save different versions of the whole pcb - which I don’t. I want several versions of a sub-board that will be manufactured at the same time. So that’s the goal. One schematic but with some kind of duplicated sections of the PCB file.
Maybe there’s no clean or easy way but I’ve only been using Kicad for a year and a half so I thought I would post this.
Is there any kind of cleaner way to do this - maybe an “instance” in PCB editor? Please give me a schematic idea of how it would work, if you’ve done something similar
I have a bit of troubles in understanding your intentions, but I think you want to make a “hierarchical” schematic.
This basically mean that you have multiple pages in the Schematic editor, and a schematic file can be included multiple times. Details of hierarchical sheets have been described many times (including in the manual).
In KiCad there is no real support for what I think you may want.
Currently it’s mainly one project with one (possibly hierarchical) schematic and one PCB.
I guess I could copy the pcb file and give it a new name. But I think I’d a have to swap the pcb files in and out with name changes. And one never knows what other stuff is linked to the file that would throw a monkey wrench into that idea, such as the (to me) mysterious lock file, about which I wasted a couple hours or more and finally wrote up with a bug report.
So for now it’s a pretty simple schematic and I’ll just double things up there and try to check carefully that I haven’t done anything stupid like forgetting to hook something up. Thanks again for the reply.