Edge.Cut Arcs Changing causing discontinuity

[aaron]

I have an odd shaped board outline that has eight straight edges connected by arcs. This outline was originally an imported DXF file. I had to go back a tweak the straight line end points to match the arc end points so that the outline would close and display properly.

After a first pass at placing connector footprints on the board, I checked the board in the pcbnew 3D viewer, then exported to STEP. Both the pcbnew STEP export and StepUP complained about a discontinuity. I rechecked the edge to arc endpoints and found some where slightly off again. These where at the arc end points, not the arc start points.

Two Questions:

1. Has there a known behavior causing arc end points to change slightly due to a rounding error? (I assume toggling between mm and inches should not affect this, as I believe Kicad is all metric under the hood.)

2). Is it possible to draw an edge.cuts line and have it “snap to” an arc end point? I seem to have to enter the endpoint coordinates manually to line up the the points

Running kicad-r11234.1685af842-x86_64 currently.

Thanks!

[maui]

@aaron

Both the pcbnew STEP export and StepUP complained about a discontinuity.

Hi @aaron
you may try to use FreeCAD sketcher to fix it.
In StepUp WB there is a ‘constrainator’ utility to fix non coincident pcb edge points…
Also the Sketcher has a validate utility to fix not coincident points.

You can pull your board in FC with StepUp, fix the pcb Sketch and Pull it back to your board.
This should fix your pcb edge.
(you should add a grid origin to your board and configure StepUp to use it, before align pcb and sketcher)

Kicad StepUp: The Sketcher for Getting to Blinky

Hi, finally I have completed my kicad StepUp WorkBench for FreeCAD and it has just been merged to the official FC repo. So it is now possible to install StepUp using the FC addon installer just with a simple click! [image] In this new WB there are some enhancements: 1) The Sketcher for Push and Pull KiCad pcb Edge from the FreeCAD powerful Sketcher BSplines and Ellipses are also allowed (please read the Cheat sheet for configuring: the best is to use grid origin in KiCAD and configure it …

Maurice

[aaron]

@maui thanks for the feedback. I’ll check out the Sketcher.

In this case, I resolved all the discontinuities on the front end (manually). Then somewhere along the line, Pcbnew reintroduced the error. Note, the errors where only slightly different than the original ones. It appears somewhere the arc end points where recalculate by Pcbnew and where not the same.

For instance, an Arc with an end point of X = 196.636052 was now 196.635902 or the like. From what I can tell, hitting ‘E’ and looking at the Arc properties everything looks the same as only the center and start point are listed, not the calculated end point.