Think I Dorked Up a Schematic File

All of a sudden I’m having lots of issues with Eeschema and a particular schematic file.

Short question, “Is there is a simple way to verify the integrity of the file”?

The schematic is to big to just start over.

Second question, if the file is saved with KiCad V5, “Why does the first line of the file read, ‘EESchema Schematic File Version 4’”?

If you have had a similar experience, what order of operation did you fix first?
I’m thinking my best bet is to fix all the broken Symbol links that are now relying on the Rescue Library.

The file version has a separate numbering scheme to the kicad version. It is only updated if a change to the file version is made. Not every kicad version did make changes to the file version.

The difference between schematic file version 3 (used by kicad version 4) and schematic file version 4 (used by kicad 5) is that the restriction on pin number string length was dropped. And of course the inclusion of the symbol library reference. (There could be other changes but that is the one i am aware of.)

I assume you reference porting projects from version 4 to version 5. My workflow is documented in the faq: Converting KiCad version 4 projects to version 5 (Remap a project)

If you experience a different problem then please give more details about what exactly you see. (The reason i guess at updating is that you asked about file version and the knowledge that you used kicad 4 in the past.)

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I’m having all sorts of little problems and inconsistencies. I was hoping it was just the beer going into affect, but I have yet to have any beer.

There are two(2) things that I think I did that I should not have done.

  1. Chasing down an ERC Error, that I don’t think I had before, I used Ctrl+e to edit a Power Symbol; and create 4 more with similar names. However, I believe these were in the Rescue Library.

ERC was now happy, I saved and all seemed to be well… until I opened Eeschema the next time.

2)On opening Eeschema the attempts to rescue items went sideways. Different results on different attempts. In the end I noticed the Rescue menu in the toolbar. I re-opened Eeschema without rescuing on startup. Then rescued with the menu item in the toolbar and everything looked mostly normal.

However, ERC is giving all sorts of weird connection errors that it never flagged before.

The one tricky thing is that I used the Tools menu Edit Symbol Library References to change the GND Symbol to use the current V5 Power library. On the main sheet, I noticed a GND Symbol that was named indicating that it was from the Rescue library. I double checked the Symbol Library References and none of the GND Symbols were listed as being other than using the V5 Power library.

I deleted the particular symbol and added it back with the Power library and double checked the Symbol Library References and all seemed to be in order.

As stated in the title, I believe I brought this onto myself by doing something I should not have done. Only question is, “How to quickly bestest fix the mess I made”?

I know at least of 3 ways to repair this:
Backups, backups, backups.

I had something similar just yesterday.
I opened an old schematic and had do do some resqueing and porting stuff from V4.0.2 to V5.1.0. (I’m having trouble with focussing and applying Rene’s excellent walkthroughs on this subject) and I’m too short tempered to even remember If I pressed “cancel” or “remap”.

The 2 year old schematic looked OK, but after doing some silly things Eeschema crashed on me (No recollecton of what happened, cannot file a bug report about it this time). When I restarted Eeschema all symols were gone. Just question marks in black boxes. After a check the project-cache had shrunk from 63kB to 611 bytes.

I recovered by extracting an 2 year old project-cache from a backup into the project folder. and after that only a handfull of connecors were missing.
I was easily able to put those back from opening a saved .pdf of the schematic to remember what it looks like.
After that I also opened Pcbnew, and got the names from the Footprins and put them back in the schematic.
Then I tried a netlist export (Or whatever [F8] is called nowadays) but it still had a bunch of errors. I was not able to resolve those anymore, but that was mainly due to my state of mind. It was late in the evening and I had some beers.

If you want to have some meditative fun, then:
1). Draw a complicated PCB.
2). Years later decide the tracks are to narrow.
3). Update the design rules for wider tracks (0.25 to 0.3mm in this case)
… (I wanted 0.35mm, but that did not fit between some through hole connectors)
4). Resolve all the DRC errors, I had som 300 of them.

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