Stacked Boards as hierachical schematic sheets

Schematic
1

Hi,
I’m not that experienced with kicad and I’m still learning about the different techniques.
I want to build a semi modular system consisting of PSU-module, IO-module, Controller board and a user board that should later be compatible between revisions, so i don’t have to solder up loads of components.
I don’t want to place them side by side, because i want to fit them into a pretty specific enclosure, so the boards have to stack.

I have made each part that should be a single board as a hierachical sheet and placed sheet labels. Now I’m not sure what to do. I guess i could place connectors in parallel with the sheet labels and design the user panel as a bus backplane, but that seems odd.
I could omit the sheet labels completely and just place connectors in every hierachical sheet and still use the user controlls (Buttons and indicator leds) as a backplane.
It seems that i can’t just put my sheet labels in there and connect them in the base sheet and do everything on a board level.

I know that kicad is not really meant to do things like that, but i intend to open the hierachical sheets directly and create pcbs from them.

Do you have any other solutions, or hints how i could do something like this?

2

KiCad’s paradigm is really 1 project = 1 board.

You could give each child sheet a parent in a separate project to generate the board. Another project could reuse all the child sheets for schematic purposes.

3

I tried it and it works. You can open a child sheet in standalone mode and generate a board from that.

But decided to split the schematic into multiple projects and have an extra project, so I can have the outline and connectors in a project and just append it to every module in standalone mode.

4

In standalone mode you are missing useful features like cross probing and parity checking in DRC.

5

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