Is there a correct way to split a schematic across two boards? Or is there one planned?
I’m making a thing with a front panel board (controls) and a back panel board (IO jacks), with a space between them. The boards would be linked by wires.
I can do it by creating two boards and only populating each with the parts it needs, but this means doing without the error checking as lpcb will regard each board as incomplete.
a related question - is there a way to use wire links on the board for layout convenience without having to create them in the schematic as well?
I could put all the terminals and everything for the wire links or interboard wires on the schematic, but that would be unnecessary work and messy if i then want to make a single board version of the same circuit - it would really have to be a separate project.
IMHO this is not the way how to create two board and is thus not supported. A schematic should always represent one board. If there are in fact two board, you should create two independent LibrePCB projects.
I’m not aware of any other EDA tool which supports splitting one schematic into two boards. At least I never saw anybody doing that. I suspect this is even not as trivial as it sounds, probably such a workflow would cause a lot of complex problems (e.g. with the ERC and DRC).
For the schematic it’s easy to merge two separate schematics with copy&paste into a single schematic. But yes, for the board this is not possible (yet)…
I see the schem as representing the conceptual electronic circuit - or a logical part of a circuit.
I really dislike schems that break up the circuit into separate pages just because a manufacturing decision has been made to make it that way - it makes it much harder to understand what is going on electronically.
If the product is manufactured with logically separate electronic sections on different boards, ie psu, preamp, poweramp or something like that then separate schems for each board is ok.
but sometimes the circuit has to be split in some totally arbitrary way to make the manufacturing/assemblywork, and then it gets annoying to have to split the schem in an illogical place.
if you think like a mass production manufacturer then your way makes more sense, but if you think like a experimenter/hacker/hobbyist/prototyper then more flexibility is really useful.
It would be really nice to be able to lay out simple circuits without using a schem at all, just by placing the devices directly on th pcb editor and adding traces. I have some circuits that are simple enough to do that.
I realise this is a bit if a different way of thinking about it, but i think quite a few people would use it.