About design blocks. What precisely does it offer us? What can we do with it that we cannot do already?
With both schematic sheets and other board projects + append board feature. I can already reuse schematics and boards. I haven’t done it yet. But I believe I could already implement a workflow which allow me to swap out an entire microprocessor section and replace it by another, if steps are carefully executed.
However I can update only one board at the time. It ofcourse would be neat if I change some project in a library so that several boards are automatically updated (with all riscs involved)\
The tool is only selection, not take action. For example you can select all resistors of 2K7 on the project (all sheets). Once items selected you can do anything at your criteria. Update footprint/change to 2K2/ update symbol/ erase. etc etc
Freeze project. Sometimes we open projects on production. Cant be modified because mean a mismatch between the real product and the origin files.
A Freeze can be usefull to avoid unintentional editing. Optionally the user can be invited to save a copy of project.
3)Organized outputs. Normally i generate this outputs on this folders.
Outputs/Schematic (inside the schematic)
Outputs/Fab (for pcb manufacturer) Gerbers-pads-holes
Outputs/Mount (for the assembly) BOM-position files-Silkscreen on gerber or pdf
Schematic with text as text. At this time the PDF of schematic is created from printing and treated as graphic. This is hard to find components using crtl+F on firmware departament (they has no kicad, and does know how use it)
Yes, like many of the wish-list items in this thread, there are often different ways to do stuff, some in a more linear, others in more involute way.
About design blocks i can tell you a use case where i find useful applications:
in the place where i work there are lots of inexperienced engineers (students, junior colleagues, other field experts) and having a ‘library’ of proven working design blocks would be a big time saver.
Can you imagine how many times we have redesigned over and over the same circuit like a switching power supply (just with small variations, different parts, values, voltages…)? microcontroller? frontend?
Can you place an estimate on how many switching regulator designs i’ve seen working first time without any problem?
I would love to have a bit more flexible concept of project structure. The way I am thinking about it would be to have a more tree like structure, so that you can have multiple schematics in a single project. Then, for each schematic you could have multiple PCB layouts (for example, having THT and SMD versions of a design). I don’t know how much work it would be to allow that, but given that the designs are all kept in separate files, it would probably only require changes to the code for the main project window to allow the multiple schematics and layouts. There would also need to be some way of naming the files for each schematic in a project, and each PCB layout for a schematic, rather than just using the project name with different file extensions.
I don’t know if you have read it but I once posted my Best possible workflow It does precisely what you describe. Take the schematic of a buck converter (which is already routed and all) and than I append the board which corresponds with the schematic.
Well the schematics kinda already have this. Every schematic sheet has it’s own file in the project. And you can reuse them. You can also let more sheets use the same schematic. A bit like programming with classes and objects but only with circuitry instead of code.
And this file does not even have to be inside your working directory. That schematic sheet of that buck converter I mentioned. Now I used ‘insert sheet content’ but I could also set the path of the sheet to wherever the original schematic file lies and use that one instead of the copy pasting.
If I than make alterations to the sheet, all projects’ schematics would be updated automatically. Only the board part would need a manual replacing. And I believe that this part falls under the design block, right?
Due to the bi-directional link between Schematic and Layout I think what you are describing would be a challenge to code . . . if the THT layout is modified and that pushed back to the Schematic should that then push to the SMD layout from the Schematic ?
Can’t your requirement be addressed wholly or mostly using dual footprints ?
Thanks for that, I hadn’t appreciated that the files could be shared between projects, and that it really useful. I still think that having multiple schematics in a single project would be really good (even better if you can share them between projects). That way you can have a single project with say a schematic for a main board, a power supply board, a board for input connectors, etc. (And things like the power supply would obvious work with multiple projects). Maybe what would be better would be to have a way of grouping projects together, rather than having multiple schematics per project.
I can see extending it to a much more complex system where you could have a library of schematics that you can pull into different projects (and if you do tie the PCBs to the schematics, then include them as well…).
That might be too big a change, though, and I wouldn’t want it to get in the way of beginners getting into KiCAD for the first time. I love the way that it is so simple to pick up - I think I didn’t ever though I would be designing my own PCBs!
These are just a few ideas, and i am thinking on the fly here - I don’t have a specific need for this at the moment, I can just see my projects getting a bit more complex as they go on.
That’s a very good point about the bi-directional links - that’s not something that I have used yet and I agree that would be an interesting challenge for the programmers
I do like the dual footprints option, and that is a really nice way of doing things. However, a SMD only board could be quite a bit smaller than a dual footprint version, and I can see situations where that might be important. Also, even if you were just using one or the other, there might a case where you have say a power supply board, and you want two different form factors to fit into different enclosures for example. Maybe that is not going to be common enough to make the effort of changing the whole project structure worthwhile, specially if you share the schematic between different projects.
Cadence OrCAD Schematic symbol library Import and Schematic Import.
A fix for the project manager, library and dialog windows growing to ridiculous sizes when moving between monitors/screens when using a mix of screen dpi’s in Windows.
