Electronic – Making a schematic in KiCad; how to represent connections from another circuit board

headerkicadschematics

I'm using KiCad to design a circuit for my latest project. This board includes a number of transistors whose bases are connected to off-board signals.

What's the proper way to represent this, so when I build the netlist and PCB, these off-board signals become header pins or pads.

Yeah, newbcakes here…

EDIT –
I found a 12×1 connector which does exactly what you think it does. Now, that happens with this when I convert the schematic to a PCB, I don't know. Stay tuned…

EDIT 2 –
I have learned nothing happens to the 12×1 connector automatically. Instead, on the next step towards pcb-ing, you have to tell KiCAD what everything is. I did and it worked fine, though there weren't many options so I selected a 7×2 DIP. I'm 95.982% sure I can make what I need, however. This is the least of my worries, lol.

Best Answer

You can split your design into a hierarchy (e.g. multiple pages), then have local nets to each page and also global nets. You can also use specific page to page connectors (so the page symbol is like a component you can drop into another page (over on the right hand icon set you will see an icon labelled "Place hierarchical pin in sheet" and another named "Place a hierarchical label" and a couple of other related icons)
Have a play around with the demo projects to see how it works. There are also some good tutorials out there that go through this stuff. Tutorial 1, Wiki Kicad, Hierarchy Tutorial.

Go into wherever Kicad is installed (e.g. Program Files/Kicad/Share/Demos), and look in the Demos folder for plenty of examples of different ways of doing things.