New to KiCAD and shocked by what I just learned (schematic capture)

[Jonathan Levine]

Hi, folks.  My bona fides:  I'm not a developer, but a hardware engineer who's been using

EDA for about 35 years, and before that about 8 years of hand-taped PCBs.  I've been a

Mentor (old version under HP-UX) user for more than 20 years, so that's my point of

reference.

On the advice of a trusted friend, I've decided to give V6 a shot, starting with the reproduction

(including some reverse-engineering) of some old through-hole boards, which should be a nice, gentle introduction.  I dearly love Mentor, but feel I need to make a serious effort to

modernize and get compatible with the tools an increasing number of people are now

using.  I'm working from poor quality schematics, so that's my starting point:  Redraw

good ones.

What I encountered today in the course of that schematic entry has really rattled me, and

calls into question whether KiCAD can be considered a serious tool.  Rather than my

repeating myself here, please take a look at the forum exchange I initiated tonight.

https://forum.kicad.info/t/symbol-editing-and-the-netlist/39271

I eagerly look foreward to a vigorous debate.

Jonathan

[Seth Hillbrand]

Hi Jonathan,

We don't really do debate about opinions on the list. Or we try not to.  It is not productive.

If KiCad doesn't do what you want it to, please submit a wishlist report to the issue tracker.  You can access this under the help menu with 'Report a Bug'

If other people feel the same way, then they will indicate that on the issue report.

I will caution however that if you come into any community and immediately say things like "[this] calls into question whether KiCAD can be considered a serious tool", you are unlikely to get a favorable response. KiCad will work differently from your other EDA experience.  

Seth

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[Kuba Sunderland-Ober]

Anecdote time - from my experience with EAGLE. Trying to treat lines on a schematic/PCB as if they were live entries in a netlist database is a terrible user experience. It treats the human operator like a machine that has to adhere to a very specific workflow. It can really get in the way - at least did for me.

I wonder how Mentor had been adjusting those connections? Schematics can be pretty dense sometimes, and moving a single wire to follow a pin will just overlap it with something else, or the routing of the wire won't succeed without manual intervention. If you could take some screen videos of Mentor doing it on HP-UX, perhaps it'd make it easier to see what behavior you're expecting. That would be IMHO a first step. And go for both a dense digital design as well as for a complex analog schematic, with op-amps and such.

How do you propose this feature would work on the first schematic below? Suppose I would modify the pin placement on any of the symbols - say op-amps, transistors, transformer, etc?

Next, how would it work on the second schematic below, where the routing grid is quite full and many reasonable wire paths are filled-up already?

I'm not trying to argue pro- or against, but rather understand how that feature actually works. I don't think it will be easy to convey without some screen videos though. Perhaps Mentor folks did something brilliant that we're unaware of?

If you're serious about perhaps getting it implemented, it will take some work on your part to specify the feature and marshal it through to completion. I wouldn't mind implementing something like that at least as a proof-of-concept. But that's still quite a way away.

Cheers, Kuba

P.S. The first schematic is a reverse-engineering of a Kepco power supply. The second schematic is one half of a nibble's worth of registers in a discrete 4000-logic Z80 implementation.

P.P.S. I apologize for the size of those schematic PNGs - about 1.5MB total. They'd be unreadable if I made them any smaller.

[Jon Evans]

Please let's let this thread lie.  It turned into an unproductive flame war on the forum, and as Seth mentioned, here isn't the place to request changes to how KiCad works.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/kicad.org/d/msgid/devlist/aba7daeb-2dce-43e1-b97c-355f391e6b2fn%40kicad.org.