kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Brian,

The doc changes I have staged are here:
https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-doc/compare/master...craftyjon:bus_upgrades

I'll be writing a white paper on the new connectivity system (aimed at
developers) and also probably some more user docs just to expand the number
of examples and screenshots.

Placing of net labels is still important, but with the new system, a bus
has knowledge of what nets it contains, so you can run ERC checks that look
for mismatches, easily pull out / unfold nets from an existing bus, and
other features.
Placing of net-bus entries is still important, since they are used for
determining where a net is graphically tied into a bus for ERC checking and
netlisting.
It's just bus-bus entries that are not useful in the new system, because
any graphically-connected set of bus wires (whether they connect with
bus-bus entries or junctions) carry the same connectivity.

-Jon

On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 9:59 PM Brian <lotharyx@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi Jon,
>
> Is there some documentation I could review about the changes to the bus
> system? It’s a feature I don’t use on a majority of projects, but I
> remember finding it to be little more than eye-candy when I used it last
> (i.e., the placing of net labels did all the work, and the blue lines and
> bus entries were only for appearance’s sake).  I’m interested to learn
> about the changes.
>
> Cheers,
> -Brian
>
> > On Mar 19, 2019, at 9:37 PM, Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Hi all,
> >
> > One of the things I want to clean up in the UX after the bus /
> connectivity upgrades I've done are merged is to remove Bus-Bus Entries
> from the design toolset.
> >
> > Why?
> >
> > 1) They aren't actually useful or meaningful (they are just graphical at
> this point). If you want to branch off bus wires from each other, just use
> junctions like normal wires.
> >
> > 2) They are confusing. I've heard this from several users, because they
> look and sound a lot like Bus-Wire Entries, which are useful.
> >
> > What about old designs?
> >
> > My proposal is to just remove the tools to allow placement of new
> Bus-Bus Entries without removing the underlying code to handle them.
> Existing designs would still load and render properly.
> >
> > In theory we could make some kind of migration to remove them and
> replace with direct bus wire connections, but I'm not sure that's
> necessary.
> >
> > As long as we do a good job of documenting the way to use busses under
> the new system, and update the example schematics accordingly, I think new
> users will be set on the right path. We could include a note about this on
> the blog / forums to let existing users know (although from what I can
> tell, only a small fraction of existing users use them in the first place).
> >
> > Any concerns with this?
> >
> > Jon
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