Toggle switch tutorial

[_Victory]

I hereby certify that I am not simply asking someone else to design a footprint for me.

This is an auto-generated message that is in place on the “footprints” section of the KiCad.info forum. If I remove it and ask for a footprint to be designed anyway, I understand that I will be subject to forum members telling me to go design my own footprint or referring me to a 3rd party footprint site.

I’m trying to recreate this symbol on kiCAD. It is a toggle switch. I do not seem to know where to find the circles.

[paulvdh]

What circles do you mean?
I do not see any circles in your screenshot.

It’s also not clear which library symbol you used as example.

Maybe it’s just: Symbol Editor / Place / Circle ?

Another possibility is to use “inverting pins” which have a circle attached. This is sometimes abused for graphical purposes.

[_Victory]

Hi Paulvdh

I mean circles like this:

The sample picture is from a schematic created in altium. I’m just trying to recreate the switch symbol in kicad - the circles do not have to be there.

Thanks in advance for your help

[paulvdh]

Looks quite a lot like:

And the circles there are just regular graphical circles, and I do not understand well why you may have any problem with them.

I do see you have a green wire attached. You can only do that in the schematic editor (Eeschema). For modiying or creating symbols you need the Symbol Editor.

[_Victory]

I’m trying to create a symbol and footprint for this particular toggle switch qwithh model E101. Will the sw_spdt symbol work for this?

[der.ule]

Yes, in KiCAD the symbols and footprints are only loosely couple, meaning that you can use the stock symbol from kicad and associated with your desired footprint; that being said, if you want to have a pair of symbol/footprint to use later in other projects, you simply make a copy of the symbol into your personal library, rename as you want and associate your footprint to it, that way, every time you use the symbol from your personal library, it will be associated with that footprint.

p.s. When using generic symbols from the KiCAD library, you should verify that the pinout corresponds to the one you expect in the footprint.

Here some links from the forum’s FAQ:

How can i assign a footprint to a symbol?

Disclaimer: Screenshots taken from version 5.1.4 KiCad determines which symbol belongs to which footprint via the footprint field of the symbol. This symbol field can be set either already in the library (fully specified symbol) or sometime during the schematic design process. This tutorial lists all options you have to assign a footprint to your symbols. At schematic design time This workflow is less work for library maintenance and allows for selecting exact components late in the design pro…

How does KiCad know which symbol pin represents which pad of the footprint?

KiCad needs to know which pin of the symbol represents which footprint pad when creating the connectivity information of the board. See also: What is the difference between footprints and symbols? The identification is done with the help of the symbols pin numbers and footprints pad numbers. These must agree with each other. (Every symbol pin must have at least one footprint pad where the symbol pin number is the same as the footprint pad number.) This is easier to see in an example: [exampl…