KiCad 5 #13 Copying & Altering Symbols

[@andymouse]

Hi, the difference between Aliases and Keywords I never realy thought about until now, makes sense to help the search out. I do like that you think out loud as I pick up stuff up thats "real world" useful that way. Its becoming a pleasure to work with Kicad as you share timesavers and bring stuff into focus. I have nothing to compare to though, as Kicad is my first step into CAD, but I got the taste for it from EasyEDA which is great too. I guess you have used many other systems in the past and considering that Kicad is "open source" how does it compare to the bad boys of rock like Altium and Eagle ?

[@JohnsBasement]

It has been a while since you asked. I'm sure there are more opinions on this topic than there are days to discuss it. As for Altium (the last release I used was Winter-2009) KiCad is a bit more primitive. Altium is a bit more fancy than KiCad in that it has more features (like the ability to route many parallel lines & differential pairs, automatic tromboning of traces to create a bus where all the copper tracks are the same length, management of DNP (do not populate) items in the schematic & BOM, support for repeating an identical set of parts & routing on the PCB and more. Altium is priced in the thousands. But if money is not an issue, it is a nice tool. To my recollection (I only used it for a few small projects some years ago) Eagle didn't seem to offer a whole lot more than KiCad. I looks like Eagle is still/again free for 2-page schematics and to design 2-layer PCBs up to some limited size. I want to say Eagle was comparable to KiCad 5. I'm sure Eagle has advanced since I last used it. However, I do not expect to need it any more since KiCad's features/development efforts are picking up and has no page/size limitations. Due to the activity around open source these days, I expect that KiCad will become the defacto tool for open-source & hobbyist projects. Thus I have decided to use it for all my open source work and anything else for which it is suited.

[@lmamakos]

maybe add in the phase "dots" on the schematic symbol? Thanks very much for making these videos, it's great help to get up to speed and be effective using KiCAD.

[@JohnsBasement]

For this particular symbol, that would have been a good idea! I'll keep this in mind if I decide to refilm it for release 6.

[@metalhead5858]

Hi John, I got an issue I copied the part 27512 to my lib but instead of one it copies 2 types one UV and one OTP I can edit the OTP part like I want when I delete the UV part it deletes both symbols. Can you help me to get it done right ? Maybe a very small video :-)

[@JohnsBasement]

I am not able to film a new vid on this right now. But it is a good idea. The short of it is: You probably actually copied the 27C512 that included an alias for the 27512. You can delete the alias(es) you don't want and then rename the part to what you want. Locate and delete the aliases in the symbol editor by opening the part properties (I just double click on the background to get to that window) and then select the aliases tab and delete away. After all that, close the properties and then double-click on the actual part name in the symbol editor (it should appear in gray/blue) and then rename it to what you want and save the lot. Eh?

[@metalhead5858]

@@JohnsBasement Hi yes the alias was there so I first copy, then remove alias and duplicate then close symbol lib and discard changes done but the duplicate is there the copy will be deleted I fixed it