I’ve created many new footprints for a new board. Before I started laying out the board, I was reviewing all of them.
It would make checking much faster if there was the ability to do the following:
In the Pad Properties dialog box, go to the next/previous pad. Imagine two buttons: “<” and “>” with keyboard shortcuts.
Ability to “tag” a location and then get delta to the center of an element the mouse is hovered over. I say hovered over because the grid doesn’t always match up.
The use case is tag the reference point and then move the mouse over different pads or lines (or any element) and get info. The info. would be settable i.e. properties from the Pad properties window and could be the X, Y, delta X, delta Y, size x, size y, length, width, etc. These setting would be selected prior to use of this feature. So, to check a footprint, you can do it in absolute mode by setting the reference and visiting each element. Or you could set the reference on the first element, then move to the next, review the info. Reset the reference and move to the next, etc.
One of the most problematic footprints was this one:
Whenever you hit the spacebar, the dx and dy coordinates in the status area at the bottom of your screen are reset. This works both in the PCB editor and the Footprint editor, (and also in the schematic and symbol editors). Alternatively, you can move a footprint to (0, 0) and then use both “absolute” and “relative” measurements at the same time. Just remember to exit KiCad without saving afterwards, or do this on a copy of your project.
I also like the old fashioned way of testing footprints:
Not directly. This is only the user-forum. If you really want a feature, you (or someone else who thinks the feature is important) has to write a feature-request on gitlab. With a good explanation of the wanted feature. Until now nobody has opened a gitlab-thread with your next/previous-icon-proposal.
Before you open a new issue (with a feature-request) search in the open gitlab-threads if something similar is already on the wishlist. Regarding your proposal you may look at the following threads:
Especially the second issue would be help in your descripted task (overview and check for all pad-settings)
I’ve been using the “spacebar” relative method. Was looking for something more streamlined…
Have you tried the “measure”-tool (hotkey Shift+Ctrl+M)? It allows to select a “measure-start-point” and than interactively calculates (and displays) the distance to the mouse-point. So with the first click “tag” the first pad and than move the mousepointer to all other pads and get the distances to the “start”-pad.
@mf_ibfeew Shift+Ctrl+M works awesome! Thank you - I had no idea about this capability. It is particularly neat because it finds the edge of copper i.e. not just items on grid.
