KiCad

How to use "append board"

Asked by Matan Gal Katziri

Hi,
I wish to panelize several designs.
In the past, it was possible by directly appending board to an existing design.

Since recently (~several months ago), this function is enabled only when "directly opening pcbnew" board without a schematic attached.
However, I do not understand how to open pcbnew stand-alone.

I am using nightly builds via "kicad-winbuilder" (now BZR6023).
In the installation directory i found several "pcbnew.exe" files but they don't load. I suspect I'm not looking in the right place.
Tried to find additional info online without success.

Any help will be appreciated!
cheers,
Matan

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Wayne Stambaugh
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Wayne Stambaugh (stambaughw) said : 		#1

Run Pcbnew in stand alone mode means running the pcbnew.exe executable. Stand alone mode means, not in the context of the current project. The KiCad launcher no longer runs separate executables. Pcbnew and Eeschema are now merely child windows run under the same process as KiCad when a project is opened and will only operate on the files for the currently open project. That is why append board is disabled because the appended board is not considered part of the current project.

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Matan Gal Katziri (matangk) said : 		#2

Thanks Wayne.
Yes, I understood that I need to run the "pcbnew" executable.
However, the executables I found are giving an error...

Found this (end of thread):
https://forum.kicad.info/t/the-file-append-board-menu-item-is-disabled/874/12

Does that mean pcbnew won't run stand-alone if i use kicad-winbuilder to run kicad?

Revision history for this message
Best Wayne Stambaugh (stambaughw) said : 		#3

The problem is stated in the error message, libgcc_s_sjlj-1.dll cannot be found on your computer. That doesn't mean the libgcc_s_sjlj-1.dll is not on your computer it is most likely that it is not in any of the specified paths on you computer. You can either copy libgcc_s_sjlj-1.dll from the mingw folder downloaded and installed by kicad-winbuilder or you can a the path where libgcc_s_sjlj-1.dll is installed to your system path environment variable. The latter is a more robust solution as my guess is that there are other DLLs in the mingw path that pcbnew.exe will require. FYI, kicad-winbuilder is not the preferred method to use KiCad. There are nightly installer builds for windows available at kicad-pcb.org.

Revision history for this message
Matan Gal Katziri (matangk) said : 		#4

O.K.
Thanks again for the help.
I will either
-Add the required path to my path environment variable,
-Use one of the nightly builds in NickO's link
-Work with the linux relese in a virtual machine.

Also, thanks for the Great work your'e doing with this project!
Matan