Highlight components with no device pre-selected

Improvement Ideas
1

I like a lot the idea that you don’t need to have a component fully defined (device not pre-selected) before to add it to your design.

I designed many schematic professionaly and I did not have this possibility which was very annoying. I had to send my spec to a component manager that was returning me some device candidates. After many back and forth, we were agreing on a device and I had to wait again for him to add it to the library. It would have like to be able to draw the whole schematic before start this process of fine selecting devices.

Even if I like your concept a lot, in some context (professional), I think the component have to be fully defined (except for the density) before to go to the layout design.
It would be nice to easily identify components that has no “device” pre-selected. There could be many ways to highlight such component. It could be:

  1. Put a different color to the reference number like the color blue.
  2. Show it as an ERC error. But, you would need to be able to tell if you consider it an error or not.
  3. Have a menu option that will highlight all such components when selected.
  4. …
2

Yeah, I totally agree :+1: At the moment I’d prefer this solution:

3

I can propose myself to implement this option as my first project in LibrePCB.
It would by simpler to implement a different color for the reference :grin: but I can try with the ERC.

By the way, I also prefer to use the ERC to report these components.

4

That sounds like a nice first contribution :slightly_smiling_face:

@ubruhin maybe you can give a few “getting started” pointers for implementing additional ERC checks?