kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Brian Piccioni <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello James

I had been working on this for some time and ran into a brick wall so I 
set it aside.

There seems to be an issue with the structures used within eeSchema 
(sheets, screens, etc.) which don't seem to consistently track UUIDs, 
etc. I suspect that this may be because eeSchema started as a single 
page app then added hierarchies. Currently, annotate has an essentially 
binary approach (whole schematic or single page) and, in theory it 
should be possible to add those functions but you end up with bad 
pointers, display not refreshing, etc..

I put out several requests for the devs for help but, given the lock 
down got no replies.

I implemented similar functionality for PCBNew. My gitlab is 
https://gitlab.com/bjpiccioni/kicad and the branch is annotate if you 
want to take a look. It is out of date because I got really frustrated 
trying to unnscramble it. All the menus, etc., are done, the problem is 
just that the result doesn't work.


If you want to collaborate, let me know. And I'll try bring it up to 
date with the current dev branch of Kicad. Alas I find git to be a  
nightmare.

Brian



On 2020-05-07 9:19 a.m., James Jackson wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Firstly thanks Wayne for adding me to the list - long time KiCad user 
> for hobby stuff, but I've got a background (partially) in fast 
> real-time mixed-signal electronics.
>
> Working on a fairly large personal project recently, with many nested 
> and shared schematics, I would really have liked the ability to only 
> automatically annotate either a selected block of components, and/or 
> only a subset of the component types. I haven't done an KiCad 
> UI-facing dev work (or, frankly, much at all bar poking around in the 
> code a little bit) but I'd be happy to have a bash at implementing it 
> - but would welcome others' thoughts. I can't find any mention of it 
> in roadmaps etc.
>
> *Proposal*: Add the ability to annotate only a selected block and / or 
> only specific component types
> *UI Flow: *Two changes required, as detailed below. As described, they 
> do not change the current default UI flow, but offer up more options 
> for users should they wish to use them:
>
>    1. Add a new menu item to the block selection context menu, with 
> text 'Annotate block...'. On clicking, takes the user to the current 
> 'Annotate Schematic' dialog.
>    2. Modify the 'Annotate Schematic' dialog to include:
>        a. Within the 'Scope' radio button selection list, add 'Use the 
> current selected block' (not enabled if the dialog is entered the 
> existing way through the Tools menu) - autoselected if dialog entered 
> through the block context menu
>        b. Add a checklist containing the prefixes of component types 
> available for annotation (i.e. 'R', 'C', 'U', whatever...). Default to 
> all being selected.
>
> I'd welcome thoughts on this proposal, and also, if people think it's 
> worth looking at, any pointers to a quick guide to KiCad dev wrt 
> branch handling. I.e., do developers work to the head of the 
> repository or the last stable release, etc etc? I couldn't find 
> anything on this hiding in the dev docs. I can figure the rest out 
> (internationalisation, code structures, etc etc).
>
> Yours,
> James.
>
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