I’m currently drawing a solar cell footprint. I have the outline (shown here: https://imgur.com/a/JA8o6PG) which I’ve modelled in Fusion 360 and subsequently exported as .dxf (and imported into KiCAD’s footprint editor as an outline).
I now need to turn that into a polygon in order to create a custom pad shape - has anyone worked out a workflow for this? From my brief research it doesn’t appear to be trivial and there’s a lot of not up to date info out there.
Thanks in advance.
I don’t think there is a direct way to do that in kicad but you can use freecad plus stepup Kicad StepUp: The Sketcher for Footprint generation
Or alternatively use your current drawing as a baseline and use the new endpoint snap feature to draw a new polygon
The second solution there sounds easier, so I’ll try that - my shape is only 5 lines so hopefully that’ll work. I have to offset the shape for slightly different sized masking/paste layers, I don’t suppose that feature is built into KiCAD?
Hand drawing the polygon worked a treat - just a good job it’s not more complex or curved geometry…
I’m working on a related feature that will hopefully be ready for V6 – converting things back and forth between polygon and primitive. One of the use cases is the same – import DXF as primitive shapes, then convert to polygon
Looking forward to that!
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