The KiCad 6 Thread

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Also from the forum:

Fair warning. It’ll be a few days before the stable builds are available.

(how do you do that quote thing without quoting a post? I tried triple backtick but that is for code formatting.)

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Like this (Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.)

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I just started up KiCad-nightly and it said

image

But KiCad is still 5.1.12…

(And 6.9 doesn’t work, because the symbol library’s missing.)

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I guess they’ve switched over to the future v7 in the nightly builds before the stable v6 packages are fully released.

I’m planning on waiting until there’s an official blog post at which point I imagine they’ll have finished packaging v6.

I can’t get 6.9 (for Linux Mint) to work, it seems to have its paths scrambled and attempts to unscramble them haven’t worked. I had it set up to update automatically so it replaced rc02 with 6.9, so now I can’t open files I created with the nightly build. Presumably in a day or a few the stable 6.0 build will fix that.

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Does Mint use its own repositories?
You could probably install KiCad from the Ubuntu repo.

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Yeah, Mint uses the Ubuntu PPA. I now have 6.0 installed and working.

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Merry Christmas

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Hm… the symbol libraries still all point to ${KICAD_SYMBOL_DIR} (which is not empty after the update to 6) instead of ${KICAD6_SYMBOL_DIR}… could this be because I imported the setting from the previous version? Any good ideas how to fix this? Just setting ${KICAD_SYMBOL_DIR} to /usr/share/kicad/symbols/ might works, but seems a bit wrong :wink:

I think you can clear the user settings and library tables by deleting the ~.config/KiCad folder. This’ll make KiCad show the ‘Do you want to use default library table settings’ dialog on the next startup. Make backups of everything first in case I’m wrong or it goes wonky.

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That worked! Than you!! :heart:

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Yeah, I had I think the same thing. Probably yes because of importing settings. I ended up manually editing .config/kicad/6.0/sym-lib-table and .config/kicad/6.0/fp-lib-table in a text editor. In sym-lib-table not only do the paths need to change but the extensions need to become .kicad-sym and the format needs to become KiCad. And there’s some new libraries to be added (if you’re anal, not that they’re likely to be libraries I’ll ever use).

A pain, maybe it’s just as easy to uninstall then re-install and not import settings this time. If that works.

I also had a bunch of custom footprints that were using standard 3D models and they now had the wrong path. Instead of just changing the path to ${KICAD6_3D_MODELS} or whatever it is I decided to copy the models into my own directory, because I don’t want to have to change them again for KiCad 7. (That change is in ao_tht in my repo.)

For KiCad 7, remind me to start fresh with new settings.

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While I love that I can now do a “highlight on pcb” for sheets (they replaced hierarchical sheets with just sheets, right?), is there a way to move symbols from one sheet to another with them keeping their reference? Otherwise I need to re-place all the footprints on the PCB when I decide to better organize my schematic. Any ideas?

Yes, there is. Use “Paste special…” and choose “Keep existing reference designators, even if they are duplicated”.

What’s this “highlight on pcb” thing? I see it in the sheets contextual menu but it doesn’t do anything obvious when I click it. Never mind… maybe it only works on files that have been converted to version 6 format.

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image
:tada: :tada:

edit: to give more context, I was missing this feature from KiCad 5, and couldn’t find it ANYWHERE… Until just now.

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Hovering with my mouse tells me that emoji is called “tada”, but even knowing that I have no idea in the world what the image is supposed to depict…

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Nope, not seeing it.

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Its a party popper.

Just thank NTT Docomo for the original emoticons.

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