Let me preface that my use case is totally abusing KiCad… Sometimes I use KiCad schematic to make system interconnect drawings / wiring diagrams. These would probably be more traditionally made in a standard CAD tool at big companies. For my purposes, using KiCad is more than adequate.
At this top level, cables between assemblies are drawn as buses. In many cases, it is both appropriate and helpful to break out the individual wires at each connector. But many standard connections, like A/C power, LAN, and USB cables, you really don’t need or want to see the individual pinouts. In these cases I just run the bus bang “into” the connector symbol.
The downside of my approach is that the standard dragging commands work great for the “normal” style of connector with individual pins, but these “pretend” connections are awkward to move around – when trying to make an easy to follow top level wiring diagram, there’s a lot of moving around going on. Here’s a silly example. The USB cable plugs aren’t really connected (in the graphical sense) to the buses, whereas the cables on the six-conductor cable are.
As far as I can tell, there is no way to build a symbol with a bus-type pin so the cable is connected to the connector. Does this capability exist, now or on the radar for future releases?
You could use a wire instead of a bus to connect the USBs, just edit the wire so the color and width matches the bus colour and width.
Double click on the wire/s in question or go to preferences / preferences.
This was how I redrew a wiring diagram for my tractor… more Kicad abuse.
I do not place symbols on top of hierarchical sheets so in order to connect the bus i just use a hierarchical label. This lets me to unfold the bus inside the sheet and still use the ERC for the schematic.
To be clear, these diagrams are not hierarchical and don’t contain computer-meaningful connection information like connectivity which could even be subject to a DRC test. The resulting drawing is merely a wiring diagram used to depict the system-wide interconnects.
Conceptually, they could. If so, you could extract connection tables for each cable assembly, and also run some level of system wide DRC testing between different circuit boards and modules. I think that’s a bit beyond KiCad’s charter, although one might argue it is within the purview of eeschema.
I could use a hierarchy, but again for graphical and organizational reasons. I hadn’t considered doing what you don’t do — overlapping a hierarchical symbol and a connector. That might be a workable solution.
Hi might you tell me which libraries the symbols in the silly example are located? Kinda playing around and came up with this. Not sure if it is what you are looking to achieve.
I used a box drawn with the line tool and created a 4 pin zero length symbol.
Moved the symbol 1 grid inside of the box.
I am a totally satisfied abuser and only use to draw non electrical ERC capable diagrams. I have a bunch of boxes with pins at every grid point, can drop the box and wires connect to any point on box. Was using a zero length pin symbol to terminate wire but the box works better. Only issue is using with component in box then wire creates junction on box, just have to draw box with line tool.
I just threw that together to illustrate my point and deleted it. Those symbols are ones I made to show connectors in these kinds of diagrams.
I like your idea of zero length pins connecting things. Such an interconnect diagram could then be made “smart” as needed, adapted into a hierarchy of schematics, etc.
