Yeah i think you should start with drawing a symbol so its not weird. But i don’t think ingenuity is a problem most of the students are capable of drawing way better than me on crappier tools than kicad.
Anyway since the drawing tools in pcb editor are better than the symbol editor (now that it has intersection snapping) I did make a suggestion for ability copy paste into symbol editor form pcb editor but it was shot down.
Library management is the most difficult part of learning KiCad. This has been my opinion all the time when I have used KiCad, and over time this opinion has only been strengthened over time.
Creating and editing library items isn’t difficult, any more difficult than other parts of KiCad. What is difficult is library management, i.e. managing libraries as one would manage file system etc. (not editing what’s inside files).
The intuitive way to manage libraries would be to download items or libraries, put them somewhere, point KiCad there with simple file system path, and that’s it.
What is actually required is mastering at least three things and their co-dependence. Namely, path variables, library tables and filesystem. You have to understand how these work together. Path variables could be mostly ignored because they work with defaults in a standard installation and they aren’t strictly needed for personal libraries. But even the library tables + file system (where symbols and footprints behave differently) are a big problem. This system doesn’t correspond with any other software as far as I can tell, and therefore it’s not intuitive.
Maybe the underlying system itself doesn’t need a change, but maybe some radical invention in the UI level would do really good. Like an import wizard which could handle different situations as automatically as possible.
Also not knowing that the default libraries are read-only, and why, seems to be a recurring problem.
In my opinion it’s not enough to say that you have to somehow know beforehand that you shouldn’t edit the official libraries, or that you are supposed to create your own libraries.
I have followed KiCad and these forum discussions and frequently asked questions for years, and this really is the biggest single pain point in KiCad for beginners.
If someone gets frustrated trying to find a ready made part it’s not KiCad’s fault. But when it’s found, the process should be made simple and self-evident. The process of creating new parts from scratch necessarily has some learning curve, but the curve should be in editing (because editing always needs work, just like in the schematic and PCB editor), not in library management at large.
Yeah well database like structures that work like files are always hard. I used to work for a software company that had a product that worked to some extent the same as kicad.
The number of support requests relating to this was staggering, nearly 80% of users had problems at some point. Admittedly their system was even less intuitive than kicads, because they had invisible version tags that could get messed up if 2 persons worked on same thing at different times without synchronization.
Most often people find the items, because the parts vendors have them, but fail to get them into use.
PS: there was a earlier discussion where i suggested that a single item library would trigger a wizard. But in hindsight there should be a share version of a library that triggers the wizard.
I’m a little late to the party here, but I have noticed that some options are ONLY available as a RMB click. I was looking for the fillet option for my edge cuts and couldn’t find it anywhere in the menu and started thinking I had to do it manually then found it by accident under the RMB.
In a separate and at first seemingly unrelated experience, I downloaded the most recent stable release of Blender (mentioned early on above as being an extremely successful UI transformation), and the feature creep is so drastic since the last time I successfully used Blender to do something useful that I could not even figure out how to move the camera angle without a ton of fumbling nor could I get my model to fit in the camera view without cutting out into the empty background (FOV limitation? DOV?). I would say that Blender’s UI has actually gotten worse since that version long ago which was hailed as the rebirth of Blender. The always on screen menus are a wreck of useless information that should be tucked away until required. The contextual menus are so long and incomprehensible I couldn’t successfully navigate them. In my opinion Blender has increased in features so much that if you haven’t been keeping up with it the entire time it has been progressing, it is now too late to even try. I gave up, returned to FreeCAD, and screen-shotted my way into the turntable animation I hoped to be able to quickly produce in Blender. Blender is no longer the poster child for a successfully revamped UI, in my opinion. KiCAD since v5 holds that distinction, and FreeCAD with 1.0RC1 is making beautiful strides.
So, while KiCAD could improve in some ways, like adding things that ONLY exist in the contextual RMB menus to the drop down menus, cluttering the screen with multiple rows of icons is NOT the way to do it. Please never do that to KiCAD. We don’t need more output windows, we don’t need anything taking up more screen space. I need to see my project, not the program I use to build my project.
That’s my opinion, I’m happy to stop upgrading if necessary. I didn’t even realize KiCAD was targeting hobbyists even though that is how I started using it. Now I use it professionally and it seems to do professional level work. I could recreate any PCB I’ve ever seen in KiCAD. What’s missing?
Just to point out that context sensitive menu means that it’s applied to an object, so certain operations naturally belong there. There may even be a version on the CSM and another version in the global menu.