Placing wires driving me crazy?

[PCB_Wiz]

@Fleetz

I place a wire and no matter what it does is shows the connection has not been made show the circle and square at the junction.

The circle and square show the internal path-vertex check. If they vanish, that is considered linked.
I tried the finest grid of 1, to see if there was any no-mans-land where the circle.square could vanish,but not spawn a connection and I could not recreate.

ie I could not get a result where visually the hints were gone, but the connection was not made. That would be more serious.

@Fleetz

I place wires and they appear to connect fine however when I run a DRC it states a no connection.

That’s not quite the same in your top image you have a error tag, but the pin 3 will be connected.
The error tag may be generated something else.

Yes, with a lot of error tags, SCH side can get less ideal…

Comment 1 : Who decided Green as an Error colour is a ‘good idea’, or having ALL errors one colour is a good idea ?
Different colour tags would be visually much easier to manage, and some ‘errors’ are really ‘warnings.’

ie getting : " When I get ErrType(8): Global label not connected to any other global label might not be a design error, but a deliberate net-name or tag-style choice.
It’s still useful as a warning, as the SW has alerted the user to a possible typo, but if the user ‘really does want to do that’, the even merely average SW should not force that decision into an error basket.

[Sonophoto]

There is no scripting for eeschema, only pcbnew has python scripting. It is Python 2.7.14 in 5.0

[pmx]

@Sonophoto : Thanks for the info !
@Bobc : Where did you find the infos for the Python bindings you use ? (I suppose it was done with SWIG or similar)…

[bobc]

Mainly http://docs.kicad.org/doxygen-python/index.html and also pcbnew.py which gets installed in C:\Program Files\KiCad\lib\python2.7\site-packages (or equivalent).

[Sonophoto]

@pmx The short answer is in the bindings.

Long answer:

• The pcbnew namespace: http://docs.kicad.org/doxygen-python/namespacepcbnew.html

• The source tree for python interface (with examples): https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-source-mirror/tree/master/pcbnew/python

• The actual python module pcbnew.py (the swig interface): http://docs.kicad.org/doxygen-python/pcbnew_8py_source.html
  (View this file locally for what is current to your version of KiCAD)

• Here are the interface files for the swig: https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-source-mirror/tree/master/pcbnew/swig
  (The are the ~templates that are used by swig to generate the python module.)

• The code for the python shell in pcbnew is also worth a scan: https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-source-mirror/blob/master/pcbnew/python/kicad_pyshell/init.py

See the examples and other plugins to sort out what you need to do for plugins in pcbnew vs. external scripts

If you don’t know python (or even programming!):

• Please understand, Python is very easy to learn to use, if you can blink pin 13 on an Arduino by yourself you can learn basic Python in two days effort and the effort will reward you greatly.

• Absolute beginners read this page for complete overview: https://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide

• If you want to learn Python we always say "do the tutorial at “https://docs.python.org/2.7/tutorial/index.html”

• Python documentation for Python 2.7 used by KiCAD: https://docs.python.org/2.7/

I’ll be a self promoter and mention a couple of my own (Mostly python3 specific, sorry)

• Random notes on using python to do various things: https://github.com/Sonophoto/PythonNotes

• A simple state machine library implemented as a python class (my hello world to python ;-): https://github.com/Sonophoto/pyDGW

Hope this helps

–Brig

[Peter_Willard]

@Sonophoto

I didn’t find an “align to grid” function in eeschema . Is there such a function ?

No.

You know… there really should be an align to grid" function or we should be prevented from changing the setting… or at least get a warning of the implications.

[Rene_Poschl]

A better solution would be to snap to other things than the grid. But for both solutions we would need to wait for version 6 as new features can not be added in minor releases.

[pmx]

Thanks Bob and Brig for the infos and pointers.
But it seems to be all related to pcbnew ? Eschema is not covered by these docs, right ?

@Rene_Poschl Yes, priority driven snap system would be nice (example : snap to grid, but will snap to pin if “close enough”).
If I understand well, we have 2 years left to think about it .

[bobc]

@pmx

But it seems to be all related to pcbnew ? Eschema is not covered by these docs, right ?

It’s been said 3 times already! There is no Python API for eeschema in KiCad.