I’m using a 7/5 or 7/6 nightly (not at my computer so I don’t know the exact version)
I recently discoverer the fillet tool and have been going back an rounding my current in process design.
I understand the fillet command must know what traces to fillet. However I’m finding a lot of traces have multiple short bits at the junctions. Before fillet these would go unnoticed.
Question is: how were these generated? Is it something doing (line hesitating when drawing the trace)?
Can you post a screenshot of this?
I suppose it has nothing to do with the track segments that are drawn in the arc’s themselves.
I’ve seen short track segments for a long time in KiCad.
Here is a screenshot of such shown in KiCad V5.1.10:
And in line rendering with such a short segment highlighted:
I do find these a bit annoying, as they can get in the way when shoving tracks (the screenshot shown is not the best example, as it has different track widths in the same net). I never thought much about the exact cause of these short segments. My best guess is that if track segments get first get pushed off-grid by the interactive router, and in later edits you draw a track to or from such an off-grid point, those short track segments make up the difference.
I can’t access my computer right now. I’ll try to get a usable screenshot when I can. However it seems deleting these small “tracks” (often only circles) has no effect on the connectivity. Sometimes I see a slight change in the trace edges (a small “bump” is gone after deleting a trace bit).
I’ve had some success with dragging one of the segments, and then snapping it’s endpoint to the other track segment.
Sometimes it’s also just easier to just redraw a clean track and let the Interactive Router remove the old connection.
I’ve not found how to “automatically” remove the little bits. Sometimes its frustrating and the rats nest includes those small bits. From your wording I’m guessing you know of a better way than I.
Nope, not really.
I have not designed a new PCB in … quite a bunch of months. From what I remember the behavior of these small stubs changes subtly with KiCad versions. They can get in the way and prevent the interactive router from working properly. These were quite bad in KiCad V4 (Or was it V3?) Ad with each generation of KiCad the behavior improves.
One of the tricks I learned is to not let these stubs accumulate. It’s easier to clean up a few of them when you see them, then having an almost complete design with lots of these and an Interactive router that does not work well anymore.
I just remembered a trick that worked well for me.
Drag an adjacent (perfectly fine) track, and then drag it into the track with the offending stubs. Then the Interactive router redraws the offending track without those small segments.
Another trick that sometimes work is to fist drag a horizontal (or diagonal) segment a bit, to make the stub longer, and then drag the (now longer) stub and rub it into another track segment until it disappears.
Over time I developed a few of such small tricks, and knew when to apply which trick. But after a while of not using KiCad actively those details disappear again from my memory.
Changing the working grid triggers the creation of these fragments when you move tracks that are now off grid
Thank you. I will try as soon as I can get to my computer.
Changing the working grid triggers the creation of these fragments when you move tracks that are now off grid.
There must be other actions that create these little guys, I don’t change the grid once I start a layout. My mind works better just specifying X,Y coordinates.
The interactive router pushes tracks off-grid.
If you then later connect something to it, you have an off-grid to on-grid stub. But I confess that I’m not entirely certain if this is the reason these stubs get created. There may be other reasons too.
These stubs are one of the bigger of the small annoyances of KiCad. Definitely room for improvement here.
Are those small bits not disappearing when using “Edit->Clean up track and vias”?, just be careful it used to be that if your pours where not filled up, some vias could get lost.
I guess KiCad creates these stubs due to the always existing grid differences between Components and working grid wich is perfectly OK.
However KiCad seems to add more and more stubs whenever I drag tracks around.
I do not know if a clean-up optimizes this, I just delete the whole area after a while and start a new track from the last “clean” end.
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