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Improving Eagle Import netlist matching

 

Hi All,

I've discovered the cause of a problem when importing Eagle Projects and
getting the schematic and boards synced.

Currently when importing an Eagle schematic, labels for nets that are only
found one Eagle sheet are imported as local KiCad labels. This preserves
the visual design of the schematic some what. For eagle schematics with
more than 1 sheet, where hierarchical sheets are created in Kicad, global
labels are created to tie the nets together across the sheets the same as
Eagle due to its lack of scopes for net names.

The problem is that the imported PCB will have net names that are global
e.g "VBUS" while the imported schematic may end up with local netname for
the root sheet e.g "/VBUS". This will cause errors for boards with zones
and named vias with the original/global netname e.g."VBUS"

My proposal to fix this is to create another pass in the netlist generation
code that would remove the forward slash '/' for unique local nets in the
root sheet provided it does not clash with an existing net name.

Kind Regards
Russell


P.S During debugging this issue, I discovered that a local label and global
label of the same name on the same sheet are connected regardless of any
wires. Which if there is a hierarchical sheet can lead to the same net for
2 wire segments on separate sheets connected only to local labels, if the
identical global label is somewhere else on both sheets. Is this the
expected behaviour? or just a side effect?

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