Hi All,
New to Kicad and haven’t done any kind of CAD before.
Have had a play with eeschema and am currently encounting a few issues.
1) The grid dots are to small, as in the size of each individual dot, not the pitch of the grid.
I suspect this is due to having a high DPI display (14" 2560x1440 on a Lenovo thinkPad).
A crude workaround would be to adjust screen res in windows every time i use KiCad, but would love an option to change grid dot size & colour.
As it is currently i can hardly see the dots.
2)Trouble lining up symbols
Was after an MCP73833 for a schematic, I found a library file online somewhere, but then encountered an additional issue of the symbol pins not lining up with the grid.
Is there a way to make the symbol pins match the grid?
3) Further to above, is there a reliable library of additional parts maintained anywhere?
Having to add parts on at a time seems lit it might be difficult to maintain as time passes.
Can appreciate it might be difficult to include every component ever, but would be great to hit the ground running with a better coverage of components than currently included.
Is the KiCad github what i’m after, are these just footprints, schematic symbols or both?
Thanks for taking a look, looking forward to some ideas.
1 Like
grid dot size…
Currently EEschema is being worked on to run on OpenGL. Might be a good idea to stop by at the bugtracker and mention this high DPI thing as a wishlist item.
If you open an issue and want others from here to support it (if they think it’s worthy) a link to the bugtracker issue of yours might be useful.
symbols with different grid
The symbols that ‘ship’ with KiCAD are supposed to sit on a grid of 100 mil afaik.
Any deviation of that is either not taken care of yet (someone needs to change the symbol) or you do it yourself. Be aware, that if you don’t safe those changed symbols into a different place on your machine, an update with the KiCAD repo might wipe out your changes.
KiCAD library
High DPI displays are also the root cause of the hard to see unrouted connection lines in OpenGL canvas.
This will be an increasing problem as pixel size continues to shrink
1 Like
Then rather sooner than later a dev will be affected and seek remediation 
Have knocked together a bugreport here.
Couldn’t see a way to mark it a feature request/wishlist item.
@davidsrsb, yes, high DPI displays are certainly the trend, weather we need them or not.
I like how in some cases that it means smoother and nicer UI elements, but only in some cases.
It causes more issues than the benefits it creates.
Whilst i hated my 1366x768 display, it was easy for the GPU to drive and never had these issues.
I’d have opted for 1920x1080 on this machine if i’d had the choice.
No need for 1440p on a 14" notebook, exasperates UI issues, more load on the GPU and decreases battery life.
1 Like
I commented it, Tiny text is a common problem on modern displays, is that an “i” or an “l” or a “1”? for example
The hard to see grid dots in layout torture me on a daily basis
“Torture” may be an exaggeration but when I’m looking for them, they seem to be difficult to see. On the other hand, I’ve seen applications where the grid dominated the overall image to the point that it almost overshadowed the main image.
Dale
A long time ago I worked with 320 x 240 PC displays and dots were huge.
Grid dot size and line width should be option settings
3 Likes