kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Brian Piccioni" <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry if this is a duplicate: I originally sent if from my non-registered
email address.

 

Proposed Geographic PCB Re-Annotation for Kicad 6

I wrote a standalone program called RenumKiCadPCB which does a rules-based
geographical renumbering of PCB components and back-annotates the schematic
hierarchy and netlist.

As it stands, this is an external program written in c.

Having looked at the Kicad codebase I believe it can be incorporated into
Kicad as a standard function. Because this is common in commercial
electronic CAD I believe it would be appreciated by the user base. Manual
geographic re-annotation is time consuming and source of potential error. 

Currently the freestanding code works like this (summary):

1.	Drops into a primitive text based menu system for set up;
2.	Parses the schematic hierarchy to determine storage requirements and
file paths;
3.	Parses the PCB file to locate all components and their locations;
4.	Creates a sorted "change list" based upon the rules for sort
direction and the results of step 2;
5.	Makes backups of the schematics, PCB, and netlist;
6.	Updates all schematic symbol reference designations in accordance
with the "Change List";
7.	Updates the PCB reference designations and nets in accordance with
the "Change List";
8.	Updates the Netlist reference designations and nets in accordance
with the "Change List";
9.	Writes out the updated files.

There are various "traps", etc., if errors are detected.

Besides the issues of being a standalone program, the need to parse the
various file formats (SCH, Kicad_PCB, netlist) means that if simply ported
into Kicad the code would have to be constantly updated in order to
accommodate even small changes to the file formats.

Having spent some time looking at the Kicad code base, I am pretty sure all
but step 1 (the menu) and step 4 (creation of a rules-based change list) can
be replaced by calls to existing Kicad functions, in particular those used
for search and replace, editing text, etc.. I assume it is possible to spawn
eeSchema from PCBNew in order to do the search and replace on the schematic
hierarchy and to regenerate the netlist.

The Netlist Importer menu in PCB new would make a good prototype for the new
menu.

Use of existing Kicad functions would probably result in the code running
slower than it currently runs ( << 1 second for a large board) but that
should not be a problem since this is the sort of thing which is rarely run
more than a couple of times during the life of the project. 

Nevertheless, use of existing functions ensure the geographical reannotation
would be robust against any future changes to file formats, etc., since
reference designations and coordinates are inherent characteristics in an ee
CAD system.

 

Risks

I have to note that my participation has some risk:

1.	I am old (60) and have never written code as part of a large,
collaborative project: most of my programming experience is limited to
embedded designs;
2.	I have only a passing familiarity with c++;
3.	I am not used to the sort of documentation associated with Kicad;
4.	These imply a steep learning curve for an old guy;
5.	As such, it will probably take me much longer than a skilled
programmer to do this.

 

Therefore, it would be helpful if there was a mentor I could turn to for
some guidance, if the developers accept that this is a good idea.

I would appreciate any feedback. If you think this would not be a good thing
to pursue, please let me know.

 

Regards

 

Brian Piccioni

Documented Designs