Turning off they layer hides it, doesn’t remove it, but as I said it doesn’t matter if you keep it hidden in the board editor, too.
Adding vias is a basic thing to do, of course. In the footprint editor you have to use through hole pads instead of vias, but in the board editor you can add vias with the right side toolbar Add Vias tool or while drawing traces just by pressing ‘v’ key.
will try that… thou i did not see the add via tool
there is the add tracks and via tool, but unless i’m mistaken i have to draw tracks to get the via’s and i dont want the tracks
In kicad stable there is no way to make vias that are not connected to anything. This is why there is only one tool that does both.
is the option in the dev snapshots? but i used that i guess it would mean i cant use the stable version anymore
but anyways i have made great progress and i think tomorrow will footprint cleanup day, most are ok but a few is a bit off
still miss the photo in background option, but one can just hope it will be an option some day. so far i have taken the gerber from sprint layout program and made that in to a mod on eco1 layer… its not the best as it will be less precise… i mean using the photo in sprint layout adds a bit of unpreciseness and using the gerber in kicad adds more unpreciseness
Yes, sorry if you use 4.0.7, I read your posts hastily and thought you were using nightly builds. If you want to place unconnected vias I can’t help because I use the latest source code. In general you should use 4.0.7 or move completely to nightly builds, but the latter may have problems, although they are in a pretty good shape now.
There is a workaround for kicad stable. Place single pad footprints. More details see: Protip: nicer via stitching
I decided to start with tracks and just get them as good i can for now, that will keep my busy for a few weeks for the top side at least 
i decided to export all schematic symbols to individual lib files so they are more easy for me to handle
looking at the scematic i noticed that wires to gnd had a small label to it barely readable and i googled that this is not a label but net name as the small square for the label is on top of the wire
this made me wonder if there a tool or function withoin kicad that can generate net names/labels autoamtic if one has not allready been assigned?
it would speed up things a great deal and make routing more easy too
I think these are indeed labels you are referring to and were created by the Eagle conversion scripts, to account for the different way Eagle handles connections.
If there is a net label, KiCad uses that as the net name, otherwise KiCad generates a net label e.g. “Net-(D2-Pad1)”. These are not visible on the schematic, but can be seen in pcbnew.
Thanks for the explanation
if i label a wire just for the sake of giving it a net name, do i assume i only need to do so at one end of the wire no matter how many components this wire goes to? I’m not that comfortable letting kicad decide netnames and would like to use my own (maybe copy from eagle).
Yes, just put a label anywhere on the wire.
A few design engineers will assign a meaningful label to every net on a schematic. Then, when laying out the board they only need to hover the cursor over a trace to discover that it is, e.g., “RAM_Addr3” or “Bandlimited_Audio” or “Ext_Current_Sense+” or some other significant node in the schematic. The mnemonics can be VERY helpful when laying out a board, as well as debugging or troubleshooting a board after assembly. These names are also persistent. If you modify a schematic and create a new netlist using KiCAD’s assigned net names, you may discover that “Net-(D2-Pad1)” has been renamed to something else, such as “Net-(C5-Pad2)”.
On the other hand . . . creating unique, meaningful, net names for every net in a design takes some time. Displaying all of the labels creates visual clutter on the schematic. And, a poorly aimed keystroke can create a connection between nets that should NOT be connected.
Dale
I allready know where to place each component and where the tracks should go
the eagle schematic my work is based on had net names but about half of them did not go through the import process.
i have not fixed that and also exported all schematic symbols in to individual libs so i only have to open one to fix one… and the chance i screw things up become less
about clutter, most of those labels are so small that they only show as fly poop and i only placed them where they made sense… at each component pin and at junctions… i dont have to zoom out a lot before i cant see them
oh yes… i want to add 3d shapes while i’m at it
for the resistors i did a test with the 3d shapes that comes with kicad…
i read up on things and one thing i dont get is if kicad will render color rings on resistors or not?
and when i get to the ic’s can i add 2 shapes so it looks like they are in a socket?
If the 3D model has colors, yes. But it will not calculate the colors based on the resistor value.
Look: I created a new kicad3Dmodels library
Yes. Socket and chip models overlap seamlessly
yeah i came across that lib but i need to read the install instructions again as i’m a kind of a dummie and i have only been using kicad for a few weeks
i gave up on that lib first time arround, eyecandy is not that important before all tracks are done and general shapes are in place
i managed to get general shapes for the resistors and some of the axial capacitors, but getting to the IC’s it gets a bit strange… i add a socket for the first of the 40 pin ic’s but when i open the 3d viewer i get the ic
i googled a little and the only thing here on the forum that turned up was a lenghtly debate that ended up in someone saying dont use sockets… that does not help me as i want to use them
Well that might be because the socket footprint has the wrong 3d model assigned. (I checked a random socket footprint in the official lib and that one at least has the _socket suffix also in the 3d path. So i guess you have your socket footprint from some other place or i was lucky with the random footprint i checked.)
Remember that the official lib does not claim to be complete. We have what has been contributed. If something is missing it is not because we don’t want it but because nobody cared to contribute it in a way that we can accept it. (Contributions to the official library need to follow the kicad library convention. We prefer quality over quantity.)
i was looking in the DIP sockets folder that came with kicad
\Program Files\KiCad\share\kicad\modules\packages3d\Sockets_DIP.3dshapes
the one i looked at was DIP-40_600
