Agreed 100%, one schematic = one board, by far the safest way to do
things.
You can put as many schematics and PCB's as you want into a project, so
there is no real issue. The problem is good working practice or lack
of.
Andy
On Sun, 3 Jun 2012 00:22:56 -0700 (PDT)
Jeff Kaskey <jkaskey@...> wrote:
Careful what you ask for...
With the huge warning that this is purely my opinion, I can not imagine wanting multiple boards on a single schematic. Typically a schematic goes through many revs before a build, then often a few revs after that. If only one of the boards in a multi-board system needs changes, then it would be hard for someone looking at the schematics later to determine which board had been changed. All they would know is that the schematic had been revised sometime after the last build. Sure, you could manually put in good notes, and I'm sure that would be the intention, but it would be unlikely to happen consistently.?
It is sort of the opposite of how we develop software. It is possible, but a poor idea, to develop multiple programs all in one source file. Why use lots of little files when developing code? Because (partly) once something is locked down and working you don't want to open it up to change some unrelated thing. Likewise for a schematic. Why risk whacking something that is fine just because I am making a modification to a different board? Also, if you want to hand the schematic of one board off to another designer you either have to rip the schematic apart first (risking various errors) or you have two people working on different boards in the same schematic. That's an interesting change management problem!
OK, I can see in a single-person jack-of-all-trades, plays-poorly-with-others environment, you might be able to use such a feature, but it seems a very poor practice to encourage. I suspect there are higher priority features, usable by individuals and organizations, that would be larger bang for the buck.
-j
________________________________
From: Paul Carew <paul@...>
To: kicad-users@...
Sent: Friday, June 1, 2012 7:36 PM
Subject: [kicad-users] I would like to suggest a Feature enhancement-Schematic Sheet property addition
?
I was thinking that it might be fairly straight fwd to enhance the hierarchy system to directly support multi board systems/projects.
I haven't waded into the code yet, but the hierarchy feature is pretty comprehensive. By adding a small extension, it may be possible to support documenting and laying ou a multi-board project.
I know this has been much discussed in the past, but thoughts/changes/suggestions are welcome.
Details:
Aim: to enable KiCad to serve as a multi board system cad tool.
KiCad has a great and useful mechanisim for embedding hierarchical schematic sheets.
At the moment, all embedded sheets are rolled up into one top layer net list / pcb. It would be great to add a property to a schematic sheet to indicate that it is to be an independent board.
A root sheet would automaticically have this poroperty set.
By setting this property on a hiearchical sheet, we would be able to expand KiCad to also support both a multi card design and/or allow a schematic to have daughter cards.
When creating an embedded hierachical sheet, if the setting is not set (the default) then KiCad would operate as it does today and roll all hierarchical sheets into the top level PCB.
If a hierarchical sheet has the property set, a netlist generation+pcb would be constained to that sheet (and any additional hierarchical sheets contained within it).
This would allow a single project to be either a single board (as it is today), or a collection of boards (I.E. a system).
