kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Brian Piccioni <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kiway is a “sockets” (I think that is the correct term) system for communications between things like eeSchema and PCBNew. That’s how if you select a part in PCBNew and have eeSchema running it highlights the part in the schematic.

The way I envision the prototype working is that I’ll prepare a “change list” in PCBNew and pipe that over to eeSchema which will update the schematic. Then those changes will be imported into PCBNew. Alternatively I might create a means so that changing a ref-des in PCBNew uses Kiway to update that refdes in the schematic. Note that these are for proof of concept at the moment and so I can figure out how the Kicad code works. I am not a professional programmer so this is a big deal.

In the final version, if I understand correctly, in V6 changes to the PCB will be back-annotated to the schematic in order to support pin and  gate swapping. So updating the PCB will immediately incorporate the changes to the schematic. I haven’t seen any discussions of how this will be done but clearly if the prototype as described above works it will be trivial to support the V6 common database.

As I indicated my application parses the files, creates a change list, then updates all the files so actually incorporating the function into Kicad is (with the exception of Kiway communications) a small subset of what the application already does. Its just a matter of stripping out the parsing. 

From: Alexander Shuklin
Sent: November 6, 2019 11:22 AM
To: Brian Piccioni; Wayne Stambaugh; Simon Richter
Cc: Ian.S.McInerney@xxxxxxxx; KiCad Developers
Subject: Re: [Kicad-developers] Back annotate references from PCB

Hi,
thanks for answers!
Brian, I will definitely like to give a hand. But before start
everything I need to study things guys talking about. I haven't really
look about KIWAY yet. Probably after that I will have more clear look
how to implement that.
And many thanks for suggestions and advices.

On Wed, 6 Nov 2019 at 17:56, Brian Piccioni <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Brian here.
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> My utility is up on GitHub as a standalone app. I learned enough c++ and wxWidgets so porting it to Kicad should be useful.
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> I set porting it to Kicad itself to the side for a few months so I could catch up with life and since it is destined for V6 (IIRC) I have some time.  While there is a lot of code in Kicad and lots of moving parts I have a clear path to porting it over using Kiway, etc.. Essentially this means
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> Replacing my homebrew parsing of PCB, Schematic, and netlist files to calls to internal Kicad functions/methods in the respective apps;
> Once this is done I’ll use Kiway to communicate the changes between eeSchema and PCBNew.
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> As near as I can determine, everything I need to extract from the files is already in Kicad.
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> When I set things aside I was trying to figure out what I needed to do in order to add a toolbar call in Tools to access my code. Since there seems to be numerous files associated with such a change I found it rather daunting.
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> If anybody wants to help they are welcome to reach out to me directly.
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> Brian
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> From: Ian McInerney
> Sent: November 6, 2019 9:08 AM
> To: KiCad Developers; jasuramme@xxxxxxxxx
> Cc: Brian Piccioni
> Subject: Re: [Kicad-developers] Back annotate references from PCB
>
>
>
> I thought that was part of the connectivity stuff that Jon was working on (it certainly wasn't me, and I don't know if there is another Ian contributing code right now). I remember seeing some email threads on real-time updates to the information in Eeschema.
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> The wishlist item that Wayne mentioned is [1]. Brian filed that a while ago because he had created a tool to do the back annotation based on the geography of the board. I don't know where he is with porting it into the KiCad codebase right now, but you should definitely reach out to him and coordinate work so that you don't duplicate effort.
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> -Ian
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> [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1748205
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> On Wed, Nov 6, 2019 at 1:47 PM Simon Richter <Simon.Richter@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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> Hi,
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> On Wed, Nov 06, 2019 at 08:26:52AM -0500, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
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> > > May I implement some back annotation feature from PCB to schematic?
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> > You are welcome to contribute to KiCad.  I suspect it will not be as
> > easy as you think it will be.  Complex schematic hierarchies (using the
> > same schematic more than once in a design) always trips up new developers.
>
> I dimly remember that there was some work (Ian did that IIRC) to make the
> netlist the master document and attach the schematic and PCB information to
> that, with a first patch to keep the netlist up-to-date continuously.
>
> It would probably make sense to join that effort, because any other
> solution would conflict heavily with that.
>
>    Simon
>
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