I’m having trouble importing a netlist for one of my projects into Pcbnew. If load the netlist, everything looks fine (i.e. no errors/warnings) but when I click Update PCB the program just sits there doing nothing (I’ve let it go for ~1hr) and if I click on anything else Windows reports it as not responding.
If I click the “Test Footprints” button I get a message saying “No Footprints.” but everything has a footprint assigned to it. If I then close out of the “Load netlist” dialog box and manually place an arbitrary footprint on the pcb and return to “Load netlist -> Test Footprints” I now get a report about every (reports “Too many errors: some are skipped”) symbol missing a footprint.
Is there some workaround for this problem? I’ve upgraded from 5.0.1 to 5.0.2 with no luck. Other designs work just fine but I don’t want to recreate the schematic from scratch.
Your post is an hour old without a reply; and probably because you never mentioned what program was created to generate the Netlist file that you are attempting to import.
Then you mention that you used the “Update PCB (from schematic)” tool in PcbNew, which this tool only works with a schematic created in KiCad with Eeschema.
You might find that you get fantastic quick replies if you provide the information required; instead of leaving the forum members here guessing what is your actual problem.
Ahh, yes. I’m new enough to KiCad that I wasn’t thinking about being able to create netlists elsewhere and import them. I’m using Eeschema for the schematic capture and netlist generation.
@Sprig, I’ve done that and everything looks good, but when I click “Update PCB” all of KiCad locks up (not just Pcbnew). I’ve let it sit overnight in this state and it never comes back to life.
Are you allowed to share your schematic? If so share it here and we can check if it is something caused by your kicad setup or if the schematic is damaged. Additionally a bugreport might be in order as a crash is never ok.
@Efcis I guess I did start this project in v4. For some reason I had thought it was started in v5.
I went through and removed the online libraries and added the local copies. Then updated all footprints in eeshema and exported the netlist. Pcbnew still crashes when updating but this seems to have helped some.
If I run “load netlist” I still see exactly the same behavior as before but if I “update from schematic” I at least get 48 errors reported - but the program still crashes so I can’t figure out what the errors are.
I just through of that and those errors are apparently unrelated to the crash. I had just botched the footprint assignments and assigned resistor footprints to a group of transistors.
The footprint assignments have been fixed and I’m back to where I started. Crashing with no feedback at all. I’ll upload the design once I’m given the ability to do so.
Please upload your project (File / Archive Project - in the Project manager), and specify the KiCad version you’re using (Help / About KiCad / Copy Version Info - and paste it in your next post).
You did not include your custom molex footprint library. And your custom symbol lib is missing as well (not as bad as it simply means the rescue dialog comes up on import.)
Edit: I can import to pcbnew but am currently on nightly. I will check later if 5.1.2 can do it.
