Some problems setting up kicad version 5

[Rene_Poschl]

@nomadic

Is there a way to import a collection of symbol libraries (an entire directory like the legacy one) in one shot? What about footprints and 3D models?

Using the library manager you can do it. After pressing the browse button a file browser opens. In it you can use shift plus leftclick to make multiple selections. (crtl plus left click also works if you want to have more control.)

Footprints work exactly the same. 3d models do not need to be imported. Just store them wherever KISYS3DMOD points to. Or if you have personal footprints that use them, setup your own path variable.

@nomadic

While using v4 I downloaded a couple of 3rd party libraries, can i still use them in v5? Probably the installation process is same as previous question?

Depends on the exact files. On their scaling and how the footprint intended to use them is setup.

A lot of version 4 footprints had a scaling factor of 1/2.54 set in the 3d model options. We now do no longer allow the use of this scaling factor in the official library. This means all footprints are now setup to work with 1:1 scaling now. (This means the footprints expect the 3d model to be scaled 1:1)
If your own 3d models are not scaled that way you will either need to correct them or make your own footprints that define a scaling factor.

@nomadic

imported one of my v4 projects and found that the 3D view shows only the PCB, but not the components. I made a new test project with some of the same components (just placed the footprints on the PCB) and voila, the 3D shapes were there. I tried again by cleaning up my v4 project (I deleted everything except the pro, sch, net and pcb files) and got the same result. How can i restore the 3D view of the components?

Might just be that the footprints now have a slightly different name. (P2.54mm instead of Pitch2.54mm for example) If this is the case then you will need the old 3d model lib for v4 projects and the new v5 3d model lib for new projects. (“Simply” switch the KISYS3DMOD variable depending on which project you currently work on. Sadly there is no way to define this variable for a project so you really need to either manually switch it or use batch files for setting up kicad with v4 libs while working on old projects. Another easy option is to run kicad setup for v4 libs in a vm for maintaining old projects.)

@nomadic

About 3D rendering: is it possible to specify the color of the LED in the 3D rendering?

Not directly. but you can add a 3d file per color and manually assign it in pcb_new. Or make a footprint per color.

@nomadic

I imported 4 small Eagle files known to be OK (they belong to 3rd party commercial boards) and got some errors in the PCB: ground terminals not connected because the ground fills disappeared.

Did you try to refill the zone? (Shortcut “B”)
Kicad does not allow for orphaned fills, is it possible that your design had such orphaned zones?
Is it possible that the zone settings are different then originally in eagle (min width setting and clearance setting.) If this is the case then the importer did screw up and you could raise a bug report about that.