I am working to lay out some tracks service some card edges (43 positions), and therefore the tracks are very repetitive. I’d like to be able to “offset” (those that know AutoCAD would resonate here) one track by a certain distance while keeping every new iteration parallel with the previous, etc. In CAD, this would be trivial and extremely efficient. I’m hoping there’s something similar here.
I enclose a pic with the beginning of what I’m trying to do.
As you can see in the image above, there’s slight differences from track to track, and having done this my whole life cleanly, it makes me go nuts to see any irregularities. Unfortunately, I have an eye formed to see the slightest ones.
Irregularities are due to your grid settings.
Try this for fun:
I stopped long ago bothering about exact routing of PCB’s. It is very hard to unlearn the tendency to “do the routing neatly”, but it is a huge time sink, and the electrons don’t care. Long parallel tracks are even best avoided because it increases coupling and crosstalk.
The next best thing is the interactive router.
I usually do the routing in two or more passes. In the beginning I don’t care much at all where the tracks end up. Then somewhere halfway I drag one track with the mouse into the other, and the interactive router shoves the whole bunch aside while respecting the minimal clearance.
With the interactive router you can also push a track to the other side of a pad, or you can route a new path and at the moment the new path is complete, KiCad deletes the old path (Depending on how the interactive router is configured) KiCad also has other cleanup tools such as PCB Editor / Tools / Cleanup Tracks and Via’s. I usually run this a few times throughout the design of a PCB. It does sometimes delete some more than it should, but overall it saves more time then it takes to fix it’s mistakes. Both the interactive router and such cleanup tools are also constantly being tweaked, and they start working better with each KiCad version.
You may also find the thread below interesting. It was an experiment to use copy & paste as much as I could instead of routing tracks one by one, and along the way I learned myself some new tricks.
paulvhd - from what you’re saying, it sounds like the interactive router “auto-places” the dragged to overlap tracks such that they’d respect the minimum clearance - is that correct? In my case, with minimal clearance set and the interactive router on, the clearance is “greyed out” around the track I’m dragging, but no “auto-placing” occurs. Seeing the clearance around the track is OK, but of limited use if I still end up placing the track manually.
Now I am confused. The “shove” mode of the interactive router has been in KiCad for 10 years, and your post suggest you are not familiar with the shove mode.
It is possible you have always turned off this mode, it appears to be a bit intrusive if you let KiCad shove your tracks around, but if you learn to adopt to it, then it is a huge speed up of laying tracks.
Have you already tried:
Another speedup is to press f while routing. It finishes the current track to the nearest pad. I usually have my left hand on the mouse and my right hand on the keyboard while laying tracks. then use x to start a track, maybe a few mouse clicks in between and then f to finish the track. It reduces mouse movement significantly, and it also saves time because you do not have to move the mouse to precise locations. The end position can even be off screen, so this also reduces panning / zooming / scrolling.
KiCad has a bunch more tricks like that.
paulvdh - I am not familiar with the Shove mode. I think it’s off by default and I must’ve had it off for ever. I’ve played with it, though, since you mentioned it, and I’m not getting how it works (even after reading the manual).
I have it enabled with both those choices, and if I clink on a track and drag it (or if I hover above it and press “D”), it shows me the gray area around it (set by the minimal clearance setting), but it just places it where I put it. I can put it right on top of another track and the program be very happy to do that. Is that normal behavior? If yes, I’m not sure what’s the use for it.
Shift+f is also a bit mysterious. Is it only acting on footprints? From your description it seems it does. If yes, I’m not trying to do anything with footprints, just tracks/traces. If I try using it with tracks (select one, press Shift+f), then my selection disables itself and nothing happens. I must be doing something wrong.
Shove mode is on by default.
Yes, that is normal. You decide where to put a track.
That should only happen if those tracks are from the same net. If the other track is from another net, then it shove the other net aside to make room. (or nets, it can shove multiple nets aside at the same time). The video below gives you an overview of how the interactive router should behave and what you can do with it.
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