You bring up a good point. My change only deals with not requiring an
annotation under these circumstances. If automatic annotation (or
re-annotation) is attempted, it retains the old behavior. Not sure if
that's a good or bad thing, other tools have similar behavior; You
either use automated annotation or you don't but can't really mix the
two. One thing to note for sure is the default behavior of
auto-annotating components as they are placed is pushing people towards
using automated tools.
At any rate, I'll open a merge request to facilitate the discussion as
you suggested and thanks!
Andras
On 9/3/24 13:12, 'Seth Hillbrand' via KiCad Developers wrote:
Hi Andras-
Push your branch to a draft Merge Request for discussion.
In general, relaxing this sort of antiquated constraint is a good
thing. However, there are many places that KiCad expects a
prefix+number, so ensuring that you've addressed them all will be key
to accepting this change.
Some things to consider: How do you reannotate a schematic? If we
know that a refdes ending in a number is annotated, then the number
can be stripped and re-assigned. If we don't, then we need some other
way to know what the proper prefix is. This would entail storing the
prefix separately from the reference (see
https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/12079 for some more
discussion)
Seth
KiCad Services Corporation Logo
Seth Hillbrand
*Lead Developer*
+1-530-302-5483
Long Beach, CA
www.kipro-pcb.com <https://www.kipro-pcb.com/> [email protected]
On Tue, Sep 3, 2024 at 11:46 AM Andras Tantos
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hello all!
My name is Andras Tantos. I'm new to this group, but a relatively
long-time user of KiCAD. I would like to suggest a change to the
way KiCAD determines if annotation is needed for a schematic.
*Right now* the behavior is that if any reference ends with a '?'
or not end with a number, the schematic is deemed not fully
annotated. Since only fully annotated schematics can be
synchronized, this prevents updating the PCB from the schematic.
*The suggested new behavior* would be to relax this and only deem
the schematic unannotated if more than one component has the same
reference, or if any of them have a terminal '?'.
*Examples:* placing a single capacitor with reference 'C' would be
OK. Placing a second capacitor with the same reference would now
force annotation. If the reference of the first capacitor is
changed to 'BYPASS_C', the schematic would be considered fully
annotated. If a capacitor with reference 'C?' is placed, the
schematic is considered unannotated until the name is changed,
even if only a single such entity exists.
Obviously multi-part symbols allow replication of reference. So,
if U_CPU has two units (A and B), that's fine. If there are two
unit A-s with the same reference (U_CPU again for the sake of
argument) that would trigger annotation.
*Why?* This annotation logic aligns better with other packages
such as Altium. Apart from the user-education part, this is
important for imported projects: these schematic and PCB files can
violate assumptions about component naming after import and would
be impossible to synchronize further changes between PCB and
schematic.
*Why not?* It's a change to existing behavior. Things that didn't
work before would start working and can cause confusion. Libraries
are usually developed with no '?' in the reference name, so as
long as a single component is placed on the schematic no
annotation would be triggered. This could potentially be confusing
for users.
I have created a fork where I implemented this change. It seems to
be working (CI is still running) and is ready for a pull-request.
I wanted to have a discussion about it before submitting it though.
Thanks,
Andras
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