PcbNew NOT Deleting Old Footprint by Timestamp?

Layout Footprints
1

i noticed that it was taking quite some time to upload an archived project and found that .pdf files were being added.

okay, that was step one.

then I noticed that in every .zip archive, the file size for the pcb kept getting bigger and bigger.

i opened the “”.kicad_pcb file in a text editor and was a little surprised by what I found.

i have multiple entries for footprints that are no longer used as they have been updated by me for various different reasons.

everything seems to function fine, but this is a waste of hd space for no reason; even if the space is small. if every program did this it would be a problem.

any good/easy way to clean up my board file to only include the footprints currently being used?

2

Oh, too MANY caps to ANSWER that. :slight_smile:

3

There is an selection box in the net import dialog to remove unused footprints. Have you tried this?

4

Thanks Dave,

Every time I read the netlist I ensure this box is checked.

I don’t actually have any extra footprints that show up on the drawing. However, they are listed inside the “.kicad_pcb” file. As far as I can tell, this extra text is not needed, as it is currently only using one of the corrected footprints.

I don’t know for certain at the moment, but I suspect it is because I used “ctrl + e” many times to edit the footprints. I’ve noticed that doing this changes the default entries for the ref and value fields. I also used the “update footprint in current board” many times. Perhaps I should have just updated the footprint directly from PcbNew.

5

Well, I figured out what is going on.

In updating a couple of footprints, some how I didn’t get every single one of them of that name converted over to the newest version.

Which is odd, because I accidentally, used the tool to change every footprint on the board (not just the ones that I had just edited); and that was a mess because it moved almost every single silkscreen component on the board.

A couple of times it has happened that the “change footprint” dialog box did not give the expected results. At the time I figured it was just user error. However, thinking back. it does seem that some of this may be affected by the new library system with gibhub.

For example, when I am offline, I get this:

Errors were encountered loading footprints:
http GET command failed Cannot get/download Zip archive: ‘https://codeload.github.com/KiCad/Labels.pretty/zip/master’ for library path: ‘https://github.com/KiCad/Labels.pretty’. Reason: ‘IO_ERROR: curl_easy_perform()=6: Couldn’t resolve host name from kicad_curl_easy.cpp : Perform() line:92’

It may well be that I have a library setting wrong.

1 Like
6

This will happen if you have the lib setup to get the footprints directly from github. In this setup the footprints are not stored on your system. So if you use any tool that needs the footprints from within the lib, kicad fetches the data from github. (Examples are: using the footprint update tool, cvpcb, footprint browser, …)