Hello, I have a PCB design that I have finished, but I cannot see any of the silkscreened names of components in the PCB editor, and I need to move their locations in order to clear up the final errors in my DRC which are all silkscreen overlap errors. The Yellow arrows from the DRC show me where there are silkscreen errors, but since I can’t see the silkscreened names, its useless because I cannot click and move the components around.
Since I can only put one media in a post as a new user, here is a image showing the 3D editor, the 2D editor and the DRC error arrows that point to nothing, and my appearance settings
In the Appearance panel, I have F.Silkscreen and B.Silkscreen ticked as viewable, but they do not show any of the names such as “C1”, and “C2” for two capacitors. When I view the 3D PCB, I can see the overlapping “C1”, “C2” names, but not in the 2D editor at all.
I am using KiCad V8, let me know if you want to see any of my settings or any other helpful info.
The checkbox bertrand_meneroud menioned toggles visibility of all text related to footprints but there are other ways to manipulate visibility of texts too. Each text string has an attribute that defines whether it’s visible or not, and you may have hidden it inadvertently. For example with PCB Editor / Edit / Edit Text and Graphics Properties it’s easy to modify too many texts if the settings are wrong.
As a secondary topic:
Making a row of decoupling capacitors is not good. It undoes the intention of these things. To use them properly put one decoupling capacitor close to each power pin pair of each IC.
Ok, I followed the RP2040 Hardware setup for the decoupling capacitor setup. I am not very solid on understanding what the power pins are. Does that mean I should put a decoupling cap close to each of the 3v3 output pins?
Also, Would you mind reviewing other parts of my design? Or should I post a new topic and ask for a review.
This forum is mostly intended for problems with the working with KiCad itself, and not for general electronics. I’m not sure whether board reviews fall within the “official scope” of this forum, but I’ve done a few (and so have others here). Board reviews mostly boil down to the same handful of issues:
Lack of GND plane, or GND plane cut to pieces by tracks.
Mis placed decoupling capacitors, absence of buffer capacitor.
Power supply filtering.
No ESD protection to external circuits / connectors.
Therefore, I recommend you search this forum for some other board reviews, read those threads and implement the recommendations.
I had a very short peek at kicanvas. It’s sort of neat to directly show a KiCad project in a web browser, but I miss simple options such as net highlighting. Maybe such functions are available, but I do not have much interest in learning another user interface.
I did have a very short peek at:
And that is a list of 26 backups inside your git repository. I suggest you learn a bit more about git. For example the .gitignore file.
I figured that it was not in the scope of this forum, but I appreciate you going out of your way to give me a few pointers. I will research these and revise my board.
Forum rules are not applied too strictly, and for example depends on the mood of people reading posts at that moment. So if you have further questions, feel free to ask, but it’s always appreciated if you can show you have put in some effort yourself.
