First. Did you alter the default grid? Not a good idea when doing general work. Itâs OK to clean up label placement and such but the default grid ensures thing fall on the grid for connections.
Start over or set the grid so some spacing that you can move what you have into a compatible format. Maybe change back to default and use that as a reference? If you change back to the default and place a component then you can figure out the adjustment needed. Iâve done that before. Kind of a pain but once you get something off of the original grid it doesnât snap back to the original if you try and move it. That offset seems to remain. At least that was the way it was in V4. I havenât made that mistake in V5 yet.
Anyone know what the default grid setting is in eeschema? I have played so much with my grid spacing I forgot what the default is.
If I start a new project now to see where the setting falls it is at 1.00mil which I donât believe was default, it was the last grid size I used which lead me to posting this thread. Nice if there was a flag that came up warning of the consequences of changing grid sizes during a schematic capture.
Anyway be nice to know what the default grid setting is?
If you really want to recover what you have done already, it is possible to edit the sch file in a text editor. I also wrote a script to align schematic elements to a grid, it is probably rather buggy.
Unfortunately KiCad gives the user too much rope in this case, since users often fall into this trap. Not sure why anyone needs 1 mil grid. A warning would be a good idea, but snapping would be even better. eeschema is due for a revamp, so it would be a good idea to post these sort of issues on the bug tracker and hope they get addressed.
I only got down to 1mil grid out frustration and in an endeavour to overcome the connection errors I was getting.
I have started a new project file and rebuilt back to where I was when I got myself into trouble and all is well. I can not recall exactly what caused me to hop into the grid setting and get myself into the strife early today.
Suffice to say I will not be tempted to touch the grid setting again. I am not sure that setting the grids to 50mils as recommended is as important as not changing the setting mid project.
The standard is to build the symbols on the 50mil grid so they are all on the same standard/grid. Just remember to keep any symbols you build on the same standard.
BTW, a slightly related question : I didnât find an âalign to gridâ function in eeschema. Is there such a function ?
Hopefully in a âkeep connectionsâ flavour ?
Altium has the option, but connections are not dragged when a component is moved. After the move : => You can get some wires visually touching a pin but not actually connected. => Or you get extra little wire segments whenever a pin moves âintoâ a wire (you see new connection dots). => Worst case : you get new, unexpected connections if a pin is moved into an unrelated wire. No kidding !
Here is a little experiment in Altium, showing the symptoms: to make things easy, I switched the grid units from imperial to metric.Then, I selected everything (symbols and wires) and âaligned to gridâ.
The base is no more connected and the emitter has moved slightly âintoâ the existing wire (the dangling segment is hidden under the dot).
Looks like Altiumâs ârealignâ algorithm blindly aligns to grid symbolâs reference points and segmentâs ends, without any connectivity constraints. Quite lame, IMHO.
Clever Kicad developers would never have done something like this !
The only automated way I know of is the script what I wrote. However, it is quite primitive, and does not analyse all the connection points which is necessary as you describe above to get a proper job. To do that is relatively straightforward but not a 10 minute task. There are also corner cases to deal with like a symbol that does not fit the grid, inserting extra wires to avoid sloping wires etc.
