I’ve been using KiCAD for a while, but recently puzzled by 7 warning messages when I run DRC on the PCB. At first I was simply puzzled as the DRC dialog simply says ‘7 Warnings’ but not what they are. Eventually found I should hit save and read the DRC.rpt file created.
The 7 warnings seem to relate to the DIN Mounting holes that I added to the PCB corners.
The positions are:
74mm , 39mm
74mm , 116mm
166mm , 39mm
166mm , 116mm
There are three messages that say:
[duplicate footprints] and list the following pairs of addresses:
74,116 and 166,116
74,39 and 166,116
166,39 and 166,116
plus four messages saying:
[extra_footprint] and listing each of the four addresses.
Can anyone a) explain what they mean, and b) how can I get rid of them?
The drawing just shows the four holes correctly, and the .kicad_pcb just has the four footprints for the mounting holes.
I’m running Kicad 6.0.11+dfsg-1 on a Acer Aspire laptop running Debian 12.
Most likely cause is that you just added footprints to your PCB, and did not annotate them.
Even for things like mounting holes, it is common to add them to the schematic (KiCad has library symbols for them), assign footprints, and then put them on the PCB in the same manner as all other footprints. This ensures proper annotation, and also reduces the chance of these footprints getting removed accidentally from the PCB.
Also, Why KiCad V6? That is getting quite old now, and people tend to forget the peculiarities of such old versions. There is apparently also a bug in KiCad V8 in which DRC / Error messages show an empty message box…
I was just coming to realise that might be related to it. I didn’t want any silkscreen text to show and had edited the designators to be just a space (it doesn’t like nothing there.) I haven’t been able to find anything on the schematic that will add mounting holes. I had noticed that if I had to modify the schematic at all, when you reload the PCB from schematic the mounting holes disappear too!
Can you give me any hint as to where the mounting hole symbols are?
I’m still on V6 because Debian still list that as the current version. I know they do tend to lag behind, and V6 is working OK for me. I could probably download V8, but as it’s down to my fault, and it works fine on V6, I’ll probaly let inertia rule…
Concerning the annotation. KiCad does not like it at all if there is any problem with the annotation. KiCad does not accept different symbol or footprint (instances) with the same annotation. But it is simple to either set the annotation text to invisible, or move it to another layer.
