Hello.

I am new to Kicad and I did not find a proper way to resolve these
two things:

1) Place thermal vias under a component to transfer the heat to other
plane layers (for example connect a QFN with GND pad underneath to an
burrier GND plane)

2) Place ground stiching vias to connect TOP and
BOTTOM GND layers (like in RF routing).

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).

I am interested in pointers to any analysis addons for KICAD. Any
experiences/recommendations are also appreciated.
Specifically:
analog circuit analysis/simulation
digital circuit analysis/simulation
signal and power integrity
thermal analysis
EMI analysis

I know of some open source programs but they would require re-entering info
already present in KiCAD.....

Thanks
John

I don't speak Polish either. However, I went to the site anyway, and had no trouble figuring out how to download his file. Under the login box on the right is a Polish flag and the word "Polski" (which is obviously Polish for "Polish"). Click on that arrow and there's a new box that says "English" with an American flag. Select that and suddenly the website is transformed into English, with the word "Pobierz" changed to "Download". Click on that and you can download the file.

Dan

Archive with screens and Eagle's files you can find at:


Regards
Kerusey Karyu

"dickelbeck" <dick@> wrote:

I "finished" this up this morning.

You should be able to now load Eagle version 6.x *.brd XML
files into Pcbnew.

First of all, good job Dick.

But... Life is brutal and full of "zasadzkas" (Very popular sentence in Poland).

I try to open a simple BRD created by Eagle v6.2.0.
Under Windows this file can't open. Pcbnew returns an error about file open problem. Take a look at the archive with some screens. I have compiled KiCad (BZR3592) few minutes ago. I'm using Brian's script under Windows 7. I've also tested some other Eagle's BRD files with no luck. :(
Under Linux I'm using: cmake 2.8.7, gcc 4.6.3, wxWidgets 2.8.12.1. This same file will open normally. But the second one (double sided) can't be open by Pcbnew. That second file is normally opened with Eagle.

Archive with screens and Eagle's files you can find at:

开云体育

?

"dickelbeck" wrote:
>
> I "finished" this up this morning.
>
> You should be able to now load Eagle version 6.x *.brd XML
> files into Pcbnew.
>
First of all, good job Dick.

But... Life is brutal and full of "zasadzkas" (Very popular sentence in Poland).

I try to open a simple BRD created by Eagle v6.2.0.
Under Windows this file can't open. Pcbnew returns an error about file open problem. Take a look at the archive with some screens. I have compiled KiCad (BZR3592) few minutes ago. I'm using Brian's script under Windows 7. I've also tested some other Eagle's BRD files with no luck. :(
Under Linux I'm using: cmake 2.8.7, gcc 4.6.3, wxWidgets 2.8.12.1. This same file will open normally. But the second one (double sided) can't be open by Pcbnew. That second file is normally opened with Eagle.

Archive with screens and Eagle's files you can find at:


Regards
Kerusey Karyu

--- pcbnew/eagle_plugin.cpp 2012-06-02 17:07:30 +0000

+++ pcbnew/eagle_plugin.cpp 2012-06-03 14:46:36 +0000

@@ -975,7 +975,7 @@

// 8 bit "filename" should be encoded according to disk filename encoding,

// (maybe this is current locale, maybe not, its a filesystem issue),

// and is not necessarily utf8.

- std::string filename = (const char*) aFileName.fn_str();

+ std::string filename = (const char*)aFileName.char_str( wxConvFile );

read_xml( filename, doc, xml_parser::trim_whitespace | xml_parser::no_comments );

-- 
Jean-Pierre CHARRAS

Ma?tre de conférences.
Institut Universitaire de Technologie 1 de Grenoble
Génie Electrique et Informatique Industrielle 2
BP 67, 38402 St Martin d'Heres Cedex

Recherche :
GIPSA-LAB - INPG
Rue de la Houille Blanche
38400 Saint Martin d'Heres

I "finished" this up this morning.

You should be able to now load Eagle version 6.x *.brd XML
files into Pcbnew.