[solved] Can't open 'Pcbnew' or 'PCB footprint editor'. KiCad immediately closes

Software
1

Hey guys,
I’m excited to get into designing PCB layouts with KiCad, but am unable to open the actual PCB editors ‘Pcbnew’ and ‘PCB footprint editor’. KiCad simply closes without an error and no traces of KiCad or Pcbnew in the Windows Task Manager. The other editors, like Eeschema, Schematic library editor, etc., work fine.

My current KiCad version is 2015-01-16 BZR 5376, but it didn’t work in the December version either. OS is Windows 8.1 64bit. I also unsuccessfully tried it by running KiCad.exe and Pcbnew.exe as administrator.

Does anyone know what the issue is?

2

Did you compile it yourself?

3

No, I used the executable from http://kicad.nosoftware.cz/

4

In this case I recommend compiling it on your own. There is a great script for that here: https://launchpad.net/kicad-winbuilder

At the moment it has a bug but that can be fixed with this patch. When unzipped edit setenv.bat and change line 57 to read::

SET PYTHONPATH=%PYTHONHOME%;%CD%\build\wxPython-cmake-mswu-gcc_dll_cm-3.0.0-win32\wxpython

Good luck!
Airic

1 Like
5

Thanks. I’ll try that and report back.

6

If not already done, try installing not in default “Program Files” folder, but somewhere else, and preferrably without spaces in the path?

7

Building it myself with the winbuilder application did the trick! PCBnew and the footprint editor seem to work fine with the self-built version, although I forgot to change the line for the environment variables as was recommended…

@Dolganoff the nosoftware.cz version was installed to the recommended default folder of C:/KiCad, so that shouldn’t be the issue. Thanks though!