kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dino Ghilardi <dino.ghilardi@xxxxxxxx>]

Just my two cents on this.

Considering that the actual "manual work-around" to do the "back 
annotation" now can be:

-Open pcbnew and eeschema at the same time
-Select the component you want to rename on pcbnew
-the right symbol gets highlighted (but not selected) automatically in 
eeschema
-select the highlighted component in eeschema, press "U" shortcut (edit 
reference)
-change the reference in the dialog
-press F8 to update the pcb

A possible approach is to use this sequence of operations (...future 
python script?).

Since the mechanism to find the correct symbol on eeschema seems yet 
implemented, probably the only missing parts would be to implement is

Enable from pcbnew the command "select the highlighted component and/or 
open the "edit reference" dialog.

Drawbacks:
 -Requires eeschema and pcbnew open at the same time (may be this is 
not a  a problem since we also have DRC that opens eeschema when run).
 -Requires to check that schematic and layout are synchronized before 
starting the back-annotation (probably needed also for all the other 
implementations).
 -For bigger schematics the full-update via F8 can become slow, so as a 
future improvement, after a first working implementation could be a way 
to update only the modified field.


Cheers,
Dino.