Newbie here. Just started 5 min ago and already frustrated! Why on earth does the “Pin Properties” under “Symbol Library Editor” have the pin name field before the pin number! I normally list items like “step 1, do this” not “do this, step 1”
Outside of this minor irritation, this thing is great! Thank you for making this tool.
Pastebin provided for image in case of issue.
Hi CircuitDude.
Welcome at the KiCad forum.
You probably mean this (Screenshot from KiCad V5.1)
I find this order quite logical. For uC’s and FPGA’s which have lots of re-configurable pins you are much more likely to want to edit the pin name text than it’s number.
For small pin number components it’s so trivial that it’s not worth mentioning. Also If you want to edit the pin number, then you can simply press [Tab] to go to the next field.
Also, if you’ve placed a pin, and then hit press [Insert] a pin with the same properties as the previous, but with an incremented pin number is inserted in the symbol and you often only have to change it’s name to make it purrfect.
There is also a “Show Pin Table” Icon, and when you click it you can edit all pin properties of all pins in a spreadsheet like fashion. For a simple transistor with Base, Collector & Emitter it looks like:
As time goes on you’ll get the experience to work quickly around the quircks of KiCad (Every complex program has them unfortunately)
In KiCad many things can be done in many ways, and lot’s of people have written scripts and side projects around KiCad.
For example, if you don’t like to use a GUI for drawing a schematic and extracting a netlist, then you can use Python Libraries and a few lines of Python to generate a netlist. It’s a bit similar to using VHDL for describing the circuit.
(I believe this project is called Skidl, but haven’t used it myself).
There is also a project in which you can first select blocks of text in a pdf from a datasheet, copy it in a spreadsheet, add some formatting and then generate a schematic sybol from that.
As I said before, there are many ways to do things in KiCad.
Give yourself some time, experiment with the buttons, menu’s and Icons you see.
Hey paulvdh,
I will look into this. I greatly appreciate your help!
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
