hi my name is marco i’m having difficulties
in creating a footprint of a component that has a plastic claw that goes through the pcb to fix it, but the “edge.cuts” is disabled I would like to know how to make a square hole to pass this claw thanks.
I hereby certify that I am not simply asking someone else to design a footprint for me.
This is an auto-generated message that is in place on the “footprints” section of the KiCad.info forum. If I remove it and ask for a footprint to be designed anyway, I understand that I will be subject to forum members telling me to go design my own footprint or referring me to a 3rd party footprint site.
Hehe, didn’t know that that msg is there when you ask this… cool.
To your problem, do you got a datasheet/link for that part?
Personally I put cutout information like that (due to how KiCAD works) onto the Cmts.User layer with a remark that this is a cut-out, like so (and upon placing that part will need to follow those lines with drawings on the Edge.Cuts layer):
Please be aware that fab houses can’t make square internal corners, as the tooling (mill/drill bit) that is being used has got a radius (bigger than the ones for via holes, usually 1.5+mm dia minimum).
Hack that worked in the past (not advised, just noting it for completeness sake) - editing the footprint file manually in a text editor and changing the layer to Edge.Cuts in there. Caveat? - opening the part in the symbol editor and saving it (even if you did nothing) would change that layer info to something sane, as Edge.Cuts isn’t allowed… so you’d have to do that mod again afterwards.
You can draw on any layer and move it to edge cuts. It is done in the official lib that way so it will be good enough for you. As to why it is not allowed to do this directly from the footprint editor: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/1970
Without seeing the datasheet it’s difficult to know what’s actually needed, but often those datasheets give rectangular slots while oval slots would do fine. If the slot is narrow enough it can be done with the standard oval pad.
