Antw: Re: [kicad] New Contributor - Wanting to work on a feature (Anwesend)

[Jan Wichmann]

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

ich bin zur Zeit leider nicht im Haus.
Bin ab dem 24.08.2026 wieder zurück und für Sie wieder normal erreichbar.

Bei dringenden Anliegen wenden Sie sich bitte an meine Kollegen Hr. Wurster oder Hr. Winter oder telefonisch an +49 8232 95979-0.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Jan Wichmann

>>> "'Seth Hillbrand' via KiCad Developers" <dev...@kicad.org> 12.8.26 08:22 >>>

Hi John,

Thanks for offering to help with the development of KiCad.

The feature you mention is complex and involved.  Once implemented it will also require long term, ongoing support for thousands of engineers.  As such, it is not a feature that we're comfortable having outside developers implement.  Inside the core team, we are currently laying the ground work to support this in a future KiCad version.

If you would like to work with us, the typical path is to start by working on open bugs, making the software more reliable and predictable.  This is the majority of the core team work. And although it is not as fun as blue sky feature building, it is far more critical and gives us a good idea of who is likely to be willing to support the features that they do develop.

I hope that you'll choose to look through the issue tracker and work on some open items.  If you have any questions, please reach out. 

Seth

    

Seth Hillbrand

Lead Developer

+1-530-302-5483‬

Long Beach, CA

www.kipro-pcb.com    in...@kipro-pcb.com

On Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 9:20 PM John Neuhaus <jneuh...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

So, I'm new to this project, but I want to tackle [Feature Request] Master project for multiple boards and Feature request: "Associated schematic" option for PCB (treating as the same feature.) It would be my first contribution, but not my first big software project (I worked on an enterprise product for the last 10+ years as the lead dev.)

I think I see a relatively non-invasive and pretty seamless way to go about this, as it seems there are some parts of KiCad already prepared for it. The gist is take advantage of the virtual root and tie top-level sheet <-> pcb, but here's the rough outline of how:

• The top sheets array already defines what can have its own PCB in this scheme.
  
• Use the boards array in the project file, which it appears is essentially unused, to store the boards. I think it's UUID and filename only right now, which I think can work given how much of the relationship is discovery driven.
  
  • Blank array as the indicator for "legacy" and any behavior switching is the easy answer
  • "Update-on-save" to populate the array and update projects. There might be backwards compatibility issues there I'm unaware of, but combining these two sub-bullets would give us "open in 11 -> convert, worst case for open in 10 -> revert, open in 11 -> back to the default" for basically free. 
• Netlist export is what's used to populate the PCB, and already supports specifying a root scope, it just doesn't.
  • Bonus on this, it dovetails nicely with expanding sheet-level capabilities, e.g. "Simulate sheet..." to pop open the simulator with only a subset exported, which wouldn't need to inherently care if it's top-level or not
• Update from schematic, open PCB, and all the back-annotation can rely on a combination of current active sheet and filename matching
  • They already do, and it gets really squirrelly if you mess with it, e.g. by naming a PCB after the top-level sheet instead of the project. That half-works, and this scheme would/could impart better-defined behavior.
• There's almost nothing in the context menu of sheets currently, so no fight to add "Create Board...", "Associate existing board...", etc. 
  • Renaming sheets is a potential tricky spot
  • Good spot for that "Simulate Sheet..." option.
• All the design rule stuff is already derived from board name

I probably missed an important non-obvious dependency somewhere, and there's edge cases of course, but I think this is a natural fit and worth starting the conversation. It doesn't address the "board variant" part of #15272's ask, but crucially it doesn't close the door on anything either.

It looks like the bulk of the work is adding setters/getters, e.g. for "which board/sheet" in project_file.h/cpp.

Thanks!

John

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "KiCad Developers" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to devlist+u...@kicad.org.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/kicad.org/d/msgid/devlist/5a49a753-a27b-4451-837b-e951e8f6db88n%40kicad.org.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "KiCad Developers" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to devlist+u...@kicad.org.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/kicad.org/d/msgid/devlist/CAFdeG-pTVjjLe%2BhAM7b-bhuQ34x5vUVKpfonEjPJY_vS5S1zaA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jan Wichmann]

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

ich bin zur Zeit leider nicht im Haus.
Bin ab dem 24.08.2026 wieder zurück und für Sie wieder normal erreichbar.

Bei dringenden Anliegen wenden Sie sich bitte an meine Kollegen Hr. Wurster oder Hr. Winter oder telefonisch an +49 8232 95979-0.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Jan Wichmann

>>> John Neuhaus <jneuh...@gmail.com> 11.8.26 21:20 >>>