I would create a circular ring to fill to the board edge, and use regular zone to fill in the rest. Unfortunately you can’t draw directly onto copper layer, so you would have to create a footprint. It’s a bit of hack, but can’t think of a better way.
I guess if you are editing the kicad_pcb file directly, you can also draw on some other layer then edit the layer.
That doesn’t really work
Perhaps create a circular ring of pads in a footprint, not sure that would work either. How much do you need it?
BTW, it would be better to start a new thread and reference other related ones, rather than tag on to old threads especially when they are marked “solved”.
Thanks bobc. I’m new and didn’t realize there was a solved/unsolved system. I’ll start a new thread if I need more help.
The circular ring of pads is a clever idea. An ugly hack, but, pretty much all of the solutions I’ve come up with fall into that category. What I’ve learned is that kicad does not always take my round edge (from the script-generated filled_polygon points) and turn it into a jagged one. It only does so when the jagged edge would violate the clearance at Edge.Cuts. This leads to some very strange looking effects where, as you change the zone clearance value, parts of the curve stay nice and round while other parts get ruined by the “rule of 32”. But it also opens up a workaround (I think):
If I temporarily move my circular board outline out by a millimeter, and generate the zones using the python script to the true outer edge, they won’t be clipped; they stay round. I’ve tried adding vias, traces, etc. and it seems that the redraws/refills of the zone don’t destroy this, since the zone is no longer clipped at the edge. My plan is to finish the board, remembering to keep > 1 mm back from the “fake edge”, then generate gerbers, then move the board edge back to the correct position, generate just the Edge.Cuts gerber, and swap that out.
Presumably, it’s a big hassle to extend the code to support > 32 segments, or it would have happened already. But with fast CPUs and lots of memory commonplace nowadays, I wonder if the 16/32 choice could be changed to something else, like 32/128 or 64/256? That would be a reasonable stopgap until a better solution is implemented.
Please start a new thread and describe your situation. I’m not going to read through a 5 year old long thread to find out what it’s about. (KiCad changes rapidly, UI is different, functionality may be different… and the thread has probably evolved over time.)
