Re: gEDA-user: Errors converting from schematic to PCB...

[Richard Urwin <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 21 Sep 2005 17:53, Samuel A. Falvo II wrote:
> When I attempt to use gsch2pcb on my current project, I keep getting
> a ton of rather mysterious errors:
>
> ....  lots of repeated messages removed ....
> Could not find refdes on component and could not find any special
> attributes! Could not find refdes on component and could not find any
> special attributes! Could not find refdes on component and could not
> find any special attributes! Could not find refdes on component and
> could not find any special attributes! WARNING: U? has no footprint
> attribute so won't be in the layout.
>
> ----------------------------------
> Done processing.  Work performed:
> 0 file elements and 7 m4 elements added to boards/1p3.new.pcb.
> 1 components had no footprint attribute and are omitted.
>
> The problem is, I cannot for the life of me figure out why it's
> complaining about some ghost component with a label of U?, because
> grep "U?" *.sch produces zero results.  It should produce at least
> one if one had actually existed.
>
> Also, I'd like to know why it cannot find refdes on any components,
> because all components in the schematics DO have a refdes on them, as
> confirmed by going into gschem and looking at all the attributes. 
>
> Ideas?

In my case, which seems largely identical, the GND symbol did not have a 
netname attribute. I have no idea why it was missing; all I did to 
replace it was to replace all gnd-1.sym symbols with new components (of 
exactly the same type (AFAICT)) and it worked.

Also note John's comment about spaces. You cannot have spaces in value 
attributes. However in my case once I'd replaced the bad symbols 
gnetlist started complaining about the spaces in a well-behaved manner.

Open the *.sch file in a text editor and see if anything obvious is 
missing.

Also it was very helpful to start with a tiny schematic with just a 
couple of resistors and power. Then it is far more obvious what is 
going wrong, and if nothing goes wrong then you have more faith that 
you're doing things right.

-- 
Richard Urwin