When I was working in Eagle many years ago I remember that there was no title sheet in it’s pcb editor. And I don’t fully understand why they are there in the first place. I also don’t make use of them in the schematic editor despite many tutorials say I should use them.
The thing is, I make many PCB designs bur for my own buisness. So far I have just one whole revision. Had to move some screw terminals a few 0.1mm. But other than that I practically have no revisions.
I am the only one looking at the designs. I don’t document designs using PDFs because… well I have Kicad if I need to look something up.
I get that in a large company with coworkers, regular pcb revisions there is a need for them. But I have no experience in such matters. Nor do I expect many revisions. If I would have a revision I would backup the project and stuff it in a zip folder.
I am however starting an official buisness and I wanted to ask. What reasons do I have to start using the sheets in alteast the schematics or the pcb editor?
Kind regards,
Bas
P.S.
I removed the title sheet for one of my projects.
(I secretely like that I can put the top left corner of my PCB in absolute 0 point. Otherwise the sheet would run right through the PCB)
AFAIAC none at all for the PCB. I don’t use the PCB layout title block. I never print the PCB layout, only display it. For the schematic the title block provides info in displays and printouts.
The reasons are probably mostly historic. KiCad has roots going 25 years back and in that age people tended to use flattened and bleached tree carcasses a lot more, computers were slower and monitors were smaller, so it also made more sense to make some printouts for reference, and when you make a bunch of printouts, it’s easy to mix them up if there is no date or revision number on it.
I do find it mildly annoying that KiCad forces you to have some kind of graphic for the paper itself. If yo just delete the “paper frame” or use an empty one, then KiCad puts the default paper on screen. (Or at least it used to the last time I checked).
When making round PCB’s, it makes a lot of sense to use (0, 0) as the center of the PCB, as this makes it easier to use polar coordinates (for example for a ring of LED’s). I would also like to use (0, 0) as a reference point on my PCB (usually pin 1 of some mayor connector or IC), but because it’s such a bore with KiCad using paper borders, and with printing, I have instead settled on using (127, 127) as a reference point, because it lines up with both metric and banana units.
You can hide the title blocks and sheet frame in the print section for schematic, and for PCB, hide the drawing sheet layer. Appearance panel > Objects > Drawing sheet.
It could be argued that it’s a drawing so should have a drawing number, title, date drawn, who by, checked by, revision letter/number, details of the revision, etc. But as a drawing it’s needed less than a drawing for a mechanical part.
It’s interesting observing how prior practice interacts with technology. Email still uses Subject: fields carried over from paper letters. Instant messaging got rid of that. But they still provide value in forum posts for search and indexing.
Sometimes it can be handy to generate a drawing of some aspect of a pcb with a title block to make it official and complete – here I have a bunch of measurements on a user layer, and need to pass this drawing off to the mechanical folks for enclosure openings:
I wouldn’t say sheets really have something to do with having a professional business. You can use them for documentation purposes, to easily see the revision or in larger companies who is responsible for this atrocious layout (). My company also has to add copyright and export restriction notes to everything which is going out there, the sheets also provide an standardized point to add these.But if you do the documentation in a different way, there is no must have reason to use them.
Really? Have you thought about bringing your workflow into the current century and export a step model of your PCB for those mechanical guys.
But I do like the way your measurements look. ( I *&^%$#@! forgot the name of this type of measurements). When the KiCad programmers were working on updating the measurements for KiCad V6 I made a request for adding this type of measurements to KiCad, but somehow I was not able to convince them this type of measurement is actually used and useful.
Whats really needed for mechanical purposes is a 2D drawing with toleranced dimensions, 3D models do not have tolerances neither does the PCB layout shown above.
In my company’s PCB assembly process, the PCB is on the BOM as a mechanical component, along with screws, clips, heat sinks, etc. That way, there is one BOM that goes to the assembly house with ALL parts needed. Since it’s a mechanical part, it gets a mechanical drawing.
I don’t use title blocks with PCBs since ‘always’ (for KiCad using by me that means since 2017 and 4.0.7). In most my PCBs the 0,0 point (top/left of sheet) is somewhere in the PCB center. There is some symmetry in most of my PCBs and it is simply easier to check if holes are at -3mm and +3mm positions than one at 1.2mm and second at 7.2mm while center line is at 4.2mm).
At schematics I use title blocks.
I used to print at paper all my schematics and have them all together. It happens that I remember that few years ago I was using some solution but I’m not sure in what device. In such case it is faster for me to look through 50 paper sheets (each my schematic is one page) that are in a book-like form than to open 50 schematics at PC. Then from title block I know which project to open to copy its part.
If it happens that we change the value of some elements then after receiving confirmation from the contract manufacturer, I put the date and new values in pencil on the printed schematic. They don’t want to get the new updated documentation as for them new documentation means they have to run it through their entire process.
But since few years I forgot to print each new schematic
Welcome to the club. I used to print quite a lot (I bought boxes of 2500 sheets of A4), but now I can’t even remember when I bought my last wrapper with 500 sheets.
As an alternative to:
you can also plot them to .pdf or .svg and dump them all in a directory. When you do that, you can use a regular image browser to look through all your old project schematics.
And for further automation, you can also use kicad-cli to batch export schematics from all your projects.
To look through image files (jpg, png) I use IrfanView and there PgDn moves you to the next file. But for pdfs I use Acrobat Reader and I never found there the function allowing to just to go to next file in the folder by signle key.
On Linux, I use Thunar, which is a generic file browser, and when I set it to display icons instead of a list, it also renders .pdf files. But you can use whatever tools work for you.
This is one of the reasons the title block exists. A schematic or PCB is still a tech drawing and there are many international or local country standards how a page should look. One of the requirements is a title block with certain fields compulsory.
If it’s for your use - feel free to hide it or a make a custom template without it
A coworker of mine who is better with computers than I am (and he is older) made a program which we know as “PDF viewer”. It allows us to search through PDFs with lightning speed. You can use search parameters such as dates and regular expressions and all. The idea of cutting down a few trees and turn them them into massive white boxes with schematics does not really appeal to me tbh.
If I would have a ‘solution’ like idk a buck converter which I may or may want to reuse some day. I would make a separate project for it so I can recycle the schematic sheet and append the PCB. Obviously this thing than gets stored on a logical location where I can find it.
Linux has a command line thing for that, called pdfgrep, and as it’s name implies, it is a grep for pdf’s. Sometimes I use it to search through whole years worth of magazines in pdf format, but when digesting a bunch of 50+MB pdf’s it is not very fast. (although, Last time was on my dualcore (14+year old PC) and my cezanne (Ryzen 5600G) it will definitely be quicker.
A “real” solution for this is called “design blocks”. Those are for quickly storing snippets of a schematic and it’s corresponding PCB layout. Unfortunately, these are not yet implemened in KiCad yet, and it make take a few years before they will get implemented.
I just checked on the folder with TI appnotes file browser of file manager I use to search for *.pdf containing “Op amp” (intentionally 2 words search) and it looks it simply works.
But I don’t know how to look for specific schematic solution.
In Poland, if you help your child, you do not have to pay tax, provided that you transfer the money by bank transfer and the child reports it to the Tax Office (there is half a year for this). We sent them one paper with the total amount of transfers in half a year and planned to send another one in half a year. They replied that I should issue a declaration (4 pages) for each transfer (after exceeding a certain amount) and a confirmation of the transfer - 1 page.
Not knowing that this is how it will be, we transferred small amounts many times.
We had to submit about 130 such declarations (each is 3 A4 sheets). I asked if I could print them smaller to save paper and the clerk scolded me that she didn’t win her eyes in the lottery.
Compare it with my collection of schematics - about 50 sheet set collected for more than 10 years.
If I have done it that way than it would be now not (or hard) accessible for me. My old Protel 3 don’t work at 64 bit Windows. Old PC I had with Protel installed on it 2 years ago refused to start an I have no need to fight with it. When I find (at papers) what I need I can simply draw it in KiCad.
My old Protel refused to operate when I installed Win 7. Everything Protel, on the computer, no longer accessible. I had to fall back on printed paper copies if I ever needed old circuits.
Redrawing into Kicad from paper drawings was my initial Kicad learning experience.
). My company also has to add copyright and export restriction notes to everything which is going out there, the sheets also provide an standardized point to add these.But if you do the documentation in a different way, there is no must have reason to use them.