Component snapping only to center of component

Layout
1

Hi, since the new update of KiCAD 9 I am not able to snap to the center (heart) of a component and it always selects a pad of the component. Is there a way to re-enable snapping to the center of components?

While at this topic. Is there also a way that components can only be moved my the center of components, so that they stay on the grid of the PCB? So the move command does not snap to the pins of a component?

2

I also have this problem. It’s very annoying because the snapping keeps selecting pads, so it’s very hard to move parts to be in a grid.

3

To be clear, this is not “magnetic points” for routing which can be configured in Preferences → PCB Editor → Editing Options → Snap to pads. This is the thing that softly “corrects” what you were clicking on when you click.

4

If your mouse is over a pad when you try and Move a footprint it will snap to the pad . . . if you need to be more precise about component positioning you need to either use the Create array tool or Move Exactly or Moe with Reference or Relative to.

If you give more detail about what you are struggling to achieve you might get some good suggestions about how best to achieve it.

5

In V5 there were no such problems as footprint was always taken by its center point (for THT it was pad 1). Later it was changed and footprint is grabbed depending on where you position a mouse pointer.
I have not moved to V9 yet so have no experience with it. If in V9 you can’t grab footprint by its center than it can be a bug or may be some new setting specifies how it works.

6

KiCad V9 may be a red herring here. KiCad has a bit of an annoying quirck, that it does not choose the anchor point that is closest to the cursor, but it first maps the cursor to a grid point, and then takes the closest anchor point to that grid point. Especially when the grid is very coarse (such as bigger then the pin pitch), the anchor point that is chosen becomes a bit unpredictable. To check whether this is your issue, set the grid to something quite small, such as 0.01mm.

Another possibility are the settings for the selection filters in the lower right corner:

image

They are in plain sight, and yet it’s easy to overlook them.

7
  1. The issue is only present when selecting larger grid spacing, but, if you are trying to place a grid, this is kinda needed.
  2. The issue is resolved by can be worked around by unselecting “Pads” from selection filter. Thank you, @paulvdh.

I had done this operation previously in Kicad 8 without issue. I think it must have been a minor tweak, somehow making pad selection more aggressive.

You can reproduce the issue by selecting a grid size larger than a component size, for instance:

  1. Place a 0603 resistor
  2. Move resistor to a random location.
  3. Rotate resistor to 45 degree angle (usually not needed, but seems to trigger it more in some cases).
  4. Switch scaling to 2.5mm
  5. Click on the very center of the resistor, on the crosshair for the part, so it is clear it is far away from the pads.
  6. You cannot click on the center of the part, it will select a pad, even though you are much closer to the center of the part instead of a pad.

Charles