ERC issues

Help
1

I figured this out, but it took me a while. Here are the steps I took, which may be informative for the next version:

I’m trying out the ‘Order PCB’ function. The first thing it shows me is a box talking about ‘Electrical Rule Check’ warnings:

image
image860×287 29.5 KB

The net numbers are very hard to find in my circuit! Is there a way to search? I went all over my PCB looking at the tiny numbers on the board, and eventually found them. But I couldn’t see any problems in the PCB editor.
So I looked at the Schematic Editor, and couldn’t even see the net numbers there. I tried looking for the properties of a wire, but that doesn’t work. So I found the net numbers on the PCB, and correlated them with the wires on the Schematic. And I found a problem on the schematic - there were some wires that were not connected, and were covered up by other wires. I fixed these, re-ran the function and it all worked.

2

Thanks for your feedback! You’re totally right, this kind of warning is very hard to locate. There’s already an issue open for that:

Some notes:

  • These ERC warnings are also shown in the schematic editor (in the ERC dock), where some more context is provided than on the “Order PCB” website.
  • ERC warns about issues in the schematic, DRC warns about issues in the board. With this in mind, at least you know in which editor to look for the issue.
  • Automatic net names (those starting with “N”) are not directly visible in the schematic editor, but they are shown as tooltip when hovering with the cursor over a wire.

But of course it is planned to implement a “go to problem” function in the ERC dock to make this much easier.

3

Aha!
I spent a fair amount of time looking for ERC in the menus etc. But I guess I didn’t look in the ‘Go to Dock’ section of the menu.
I did look in the help (Quickstart Tutorial), but there doesn’t seem to be a search tool.