Can the Allow Free Pads feature apply to a footprint?

[Evan_Shultz]

At Post-v5 new features and development news, Qbort posted about a new feature Allow Free Pads which defaults to not allowing pads to be moved relative to the parent footprint. This is like other ECAD tools of which I’m aware and I like it (for what it’s worth).

As an Allegro user, there is a property which can be placed on a footprint and that allows the pads to be moved. There is no global setting. I have used this property on footprints for wire assemblies with multiple wires. The footprint may have two or four or sixteen or any number of pads. But there is a single schematic symbol (which has individual pins of the correct quantity) and a single physical part as the wires are all bundled together. By allowing the pads in the footprint to move freely, the footprint can be placed anywhere convenient and then the pads moved to where they should go.

While this isn’t perfect, it at least has a single part in the BOM match a single physical part with a single part number. The management overhead in this solution is far less than any previous method in use at my company. So it’s at least an improvement.

Using a build of KiCad with this feature added, I can see that an individual pad can be set to ‘moveable’ but all other pads are fixed. Is there a way to apply this property on all pads of an entire footprint instead of per-pad? I don’t see it in a footprint placed in Pcbnew or when a footprint is opened in the footprint editor. The current per-pad way works, it’s just not quite as elegant as being able to set up all pads to be free on an entire footprint at the library level. Or is there another way to handle the situation I’m describing able with wire assemblies?

[Qbort]

So just to clarify, the feature of being able to move pads (when unlocked) irrespective of footprint was there prior to the change.
I just added the option to turn it off because I prefer making sure I am not editing any footprints in the board editor (that is what the footprint editor is for in my opinion).

What you are proposing of creating this as a property of the footprint would be a significant change which I believe would count as a new feature (not possible as we are in feature freeze).

[Evan_Shultz]

Yep. I understand. Thanks for writing it all out.

I agree that pads shouldn’t be allowed to change easily and this is both inline with other PCB design tools I’ve used and common sense.

The per-pad setting is nice, and a per-footprint setting is understandably something to consider only when it’s appropriate.

Thanks again for adding the clarifying comments, and also for defaulting pad locations to being locked relative to the footprint location unless specific user action is taken!