Wishlist: "harnesses" or buses with named members (lp:#1419146)
Original report created by Chris Pavlina (pavlina-chris)
It would be exceedingly useful if KiCad allowed buses to have named
members. As far as I can tell, buses are intended to be used exclusively
for numbered, sequential elements like data bits; one can "fake" named
members but the support code such as hierarchy traversal will balk. The
grouping functionality could be quite nice to have for named signals as
well.
Example use cases include a memory bus including control signals, and in
the project I'm working on right now, a differential bus which has signals
"BUS0+, BUS0-" through "BUS7+, BUS7-" as well as "BUSCLK+, BUSCLK-".
Grouping them into separate positive and negative buses could work, but it
doesn't really fit with the usual differential design practice of keeping
signals paired at all times.
(Side note - I know there's current work on differential routing; dunno if
there are related plans at least to support pairs because of that.)
Altium implements this as "signal harnesses", see here:
http://techdocs.altium.com/display/ADOH/Using+Signal+Harnesses
I'm not familiar with the code that implements buses, so I don't know how
difficult this would be to add, though I might look into it myself later
tonight...