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by m0zg 1698 days ago
Two features I miss:

1. Ability to produce several PCB layouts from the same schematic (e.g. right-to-left and left-to-right, I needed this a couple of times to accommodate different chassis)

2. Ability to have "outboard" circuit fragments (i.e. a set of panel mounted pots interconnected with wires, or a sub-board that's logically a part of the same circuit).

Neither of which seems to be there, unless the review forgot to mention them. Unfortunate, but still there's a significant number of updates that make upgrading worthwhile once the release stabilizes.

2 comments

2.) is there for individual components (prefix reference with #), but not for schematics. It would be pretty neat though if you could use hierarchical sheets for whole-system design that way, though. Note that you can have multiple PCBs in one PCB file. Kicad doesn't really care.
It's less useful for individual components - I can already represent those with pads without affecting readability of the schematic too much. But I sometimes would like to carve out a chunk of stuff onto a separate board, and connect it with, say, a ribbon cable, yet keep it on the same schematic sheet, or at least within the same project. That is not doable in KiCAD 5 at least.
I agree, but the new S-Expr based format means it is way easier to manipulate the files, and maybe we can see third party solutions to fill this gap (at least for now).