I am running Linux, Debian unstable, with kicad 5.0.0-rc2 from Debian repos.
As a test I cloned this git repo https://github.com/baryluk/Adafruit-INA219-Current-Sensor-PCB and imported EAGLE project. Everything looks good. But I noticed that the ground pin is only connected to capacitor. And indeed on a bottom layer I seen some not connected rats nets and traces. So I performed a flood fill on the bottom layer, which I believe what was in the original design.
Now everything looks good, but there is a minor complain. I see all the other traces are really good and high quality, with pads, fonts, and angled traces, including the ones with rounded corners smooth, and never show any lines when changing angles. They are all in vector form.
However, the flood fill is approximated by lines around many rounded traces and pads. My OCD doesn’t like this.
Here is an example:
Is there a way to tweak it, make it perfect, or improve number of points to make it looks a bit more decent?
So I found in the setting of the filled zone (very finicky dialog, that requires to press “Export settings to other fill zones” even if I selected only GND and I do have only one fill zone for it, and then OK; also it forgets all the settings when I go to it again). There are two settings, Low and High quality. And it appears my screenshot was already High quality. If I lower it to Low quality, it is even worse.
There has been some comment on this in the past.
FWIR, the choices were 16 or 32, and I think they are now called the more vague Low Quality and High Quality.
It’s a trade off in speed / finer detail, but for larger circles it’s more obvious a problem.
Thanks. At least I know now that this is known thing. I guess, this is because flood fill need to deal with arbitrary shapes and complex interactions of shapes, so it just scans entire board in a rasterized fashion, and creates a fill shape. As such it only is approximate.
I dug about some more, and found this in-depth discussion :
I think that explains why the 16:32 segment choices went from the menus, they now use what is supposed to be a smarter fill that keeps under some error. That discussion from ~ March, so somewhat recent.
What Kicad version are you using ?
To me, that Boundary Mode : High Resolution option looks quite good on larger pads. You have to zoom in a long way to see the segments.
It’s only when your ODC turns into CDO (letters in alfabetical order) that you should get worried.
The electrons don’t care, and they are in the majority.
