Bug in track

Layout
1

Hi. I am running KiCAD 9.0.3 on Windows, and I’m a fairly new KiCAD user. I have made myself a small circuit and PCB. Last night I spent ages trying to fix an issue… a track between two points on my board, containing a few short segments, simply would not behave.

Eventually, I think I found the root cause… the first segment of the track from a pad was NOT of type Track… it was a drawing object!. Multiple delete/recreate track attempts all failed. Finally, I deleted the component (a simple switch) with the pad I was connecting to, recreated the track, and the world started working again.

This seems like either I had a corrupt PCB doc, or there may be a bug in the code. I had run many DRC checks… nothing suspicious there.
If it helps the community, I can pull my old broken PCB design from git and post it. My purpose is mainly to ID a bug… if it exists!

Cheers,
T

2

Depending on your selections here
image

you may have problems selecting the “bad” object to delete it.

This can happen if you mistakenly select the “draw lines” tool instead of the “route track” tool here
image

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For information on working with Routing Tracks, see the official documentation: Routing Tracks

Click Route Tracks to add tracks in the right-hand toolbar or press X.

"press X". will you work more efficiently once you become familiar with it.

Actions reference (PCB Editor)Actions reference (PCB Editor) in the Hotkeys chapter.

Additionally, adjusting the selection filter panel and board layers settings to suit your needs will make your work easier.

ex.

image
image1338×889 144 KB

may also want to consider using “Cleaning up tracks and vias” and “Update Footprint from Library”.

4

Thanks for your replies.
I absolutely was using the route track tool, not drawing tool. The issue was noticed when I could not change the track width… I could not even get “Properties” to appear in the context menu. Hmm… that’s odd!

Further poking around displayed the Type of the first segment ONLY of the “track” was in fact NOT “Track”… confirmed as dislayed in the bottom status bar. The other segments were. Which explains why when I had the several segments of the track selected, I got no Properties… objects of different type were selected. Makes sense… My selection filter had all (except locked) item types selected.

What does not make sense is how that first segment of a freshly-drawn track, using the correct tool, got assign the wrong Type. That, gentlemen, feels like a bug! As said, I have resolved my problem by deleting the component to which the track connected… fine, I got to keep working… but if someone wants to look under the bonnet and see if there is a code bug getting triggered by my design, I’m hapy to supply it.

Regards,
T.

5

If you can supply a layout or sequence of steps that reproduces the problem, then you can report it using Report Bug to Gitlab. Otherwise it’s probably user error but we’ll never know.

1 Like
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Either way, might be nice to know.