I’m creating multiple pins in the symbol editor and using the Insert key. However, I’d like 300 mil spacing rather than the default 100 mil. I set this in Preferences but it doesn’t seem to have any effect. Similarly changing the increment has no effect though for the moment I’m happy with an increment of 1. It does take effect in the schematic editor. Is this how it’s supposed to work?
For me it does work, although probably not as you would like.
I assume you have changed the settting: Symbol Editor / Preferences / Preferences / Schematic Editor / Editing Options / Repeated Items / (Horizontal & vertical pitch) But note that is in the Schematic Editor section.
I changed: Symbol Editor / Preferences / Preferences / Symbol Editor Editing Options / Repreated Items / Pitch of repeated pins:
The weird thing is though that I can only set it to “100mils” or to “50mils”.
It does seem reasonable to make a feature request for this on gitlab, so it can be set to any multiple of 50mills.
I think that 50 and 100 mils are the largest grid options that are available. I think it is not a lot of work to manually place pins at 300 mil spacing given a 100 mil grid.
But one thing that you can do is to start off with two pins that are spaced 300 mils from each other. Then duplicate (or copy and paste) those two, spacing the second pair 300 mils from the first. Now you have four that you can duplicate to get eight that you can duplicate. And continue in that way as needed. Of course, you would need to manually re-name and re-number the pins.
This works.
Did you use the “Label Increment” in the Symbol Editor Preferences?
There is also a “Label Increment” in the Schematic Editor Preferences.
You can use 300mil spacing for placing pins, but the Insert key won’t work, I suppose because it is not 100 or 50 mils.
To use 300 mil, you need to go to view / grid properties, then place a “user defined grid” of 300 and place and number each pin individually… All a bit messy… Personally I’d just place pins using insert then use Move with keyboard arrows.
Ack! I totally missed that there are separate preferences for the Schematic Editor and Symbol Editor. Oops. Not that it helps, since I can’t set it to 300 mils anyway.
As for moving the pins manually, I did that for the 44 pin connector. When I looked at the 78 pin connector, I started to think that there had to be an easier way. But setting a 300 mil grid might help a little.
Well, the pins are interleaved. I’ll put a pin every 100 mils but the next pin in numeric order is either three or four pins later. Maybe I should just not bother and use the standard Conn_02x39 symbol.
Putting a bit of effort into designing custom connectors can help a lot with keeping stuff organized and making the schematic neat and readable.
I would probably use a lot of copy and paste to make such a connector.
First draw some recognizable block of pins (Probably 3 in your design), then copy it once and paste it 3 times, so you have a total of 4 of such blocks. ( = 12 pins)
Then copy the whole block and paste it a few times again until you have more pins then you need, and then cleanup by deleting the extra’s. (Deleting the extras is often quicker then trying to figure out how to copy & paste exactly enough).
After this, pin numbers are a mess, but with Symbol Editor / Edit / Pin Table that is easy to clean up.
If you gain more experience with this, you can also incorporate some tricks.
For example:
in the first copy & paste step you can start by just pasting into the right Y coordinates, but add some offset in blocks in the X-coordinates.
In Symbol Editor / Edit / Pin Table Click on the X Position column to sort them in X orientation.
Edit the pin numbers, electrical type, etc.
Copy one of the fields of the X Position Column.
Paste that into the whole X Position column to line everything up.
A very much different approach it to generate a KiCad library from some scripting language.
I do not have much experience (nor love) for Python, but as an exercise in learning python I once wrote a script to generate a library of some 40 connectors in a single afternoon. In that afternoon I had to both figure out how Python works, and the library text format (which has changed now significantly for KiCad V6)
Yup, copy and paste like that is just what I did for the bulk of the connector symbol. It was just the pins I was trying to find a way to simplify. In the end, I just did it by hand. I never thought of the Pin Table. That might have easier. I tend not to think of it because the usual thing I want it for is modifying a bunch of pin lengths and lengths aren’t in the table.