Can footprints be rotated by an arbitrary angle (not 90 degrees)?

[jfhoff]

Can footprints be rotated by an arbitrary angle (not 90 degrees)?

If not, does a script exist (or can one be written) that can perform that task?

[m852]

Select the desired footprint on the board, right-click in the list, find the placement tool (move exactly)

[jfhoff]

Thanks! Exactly what I was looking for. I really did do a search in the docs on “rotate”, as well as other keywords, but found nothing. Thanks again.

[jmk]

Hello and welcome @jfhoff

In Preferences there are also these two functions for rotation:

[mf_ibfeew]

And because “more” is always better another two workflow-options to change the orientation of footprints to arbitrary values:

• doubleclick a footprint → get the footprint properties dialog → change the “Orientation” field (bottom left corner)
• open the Properties manager (View–>Show properties manager), select one or multiple footprints, look and the in the properties manager: Basic properties–>Orientation

some notes:

• the properties manager is only available with kicad version >= v7 (you should always mention the used kicad version in your question)
• both options change the footprint orientation directly to the new value, this is not directly a “rotation” option
• but most edit-fields in kicad allow to calculate mathematical expressions. Using this you could get a rotation effect:
  • assumed the "orientation value of a footprint is originally set to 90°
  • click into the orientation field, don’t delete the “90”, instead expand the string to “90 + 20”.
  • this will give you a rotation by 20" degree compared to the intial situation and ends up with a footprint orientation==110°
• And lastly I want to take back half of my starting “more is always better” statement - sometimes too much options are only useful for a minority of users, but confusing for the majority. (because remembering 5 workflows is harder than to remember ony one workflow).

[Piotr]

@mf_ibfeew

(because remembering 5 workflows is harder than to remember ony one workflow).

Who tells you to remember all the workflows?
Each user can only remember one workflow. The easiest for him, or the only one he happened to find. But if there are 5 workflows available it is higher chance to find one of them if you don’t know where they are.

[BobZ]

I used to be skeptical of the need to rotate components at angles other than multiples of 90 degrees. (OK but what about angles such as 990 degrees? Is that dizzying?) But a couple of years ago I designed a two layer board which had a bunch of wire jumpers on it. The jumpers were jumping over multiple tracks, and I found it very helpful to use some odd angles. Maybe that was due to some other aspects of my layout. But anyway the board worked OK.