I created a footprint for the TI DRV8844 chip. I had to do it because this chip gets hot and needs some heatsinking. I am generally satisfied with my efforts, but I still would like to clear something up: What is the Visibles editor on the right side supposed to do? On my system (Kicad 4.0.2 on Win7 SP1 64-bit) unchecking all the boxes in the Visibles menu does not change the appearance of my footprint at all. Just for comparison, the comparable action in Pads would have resulted in a blank screen, due to nothing being selected. Yes, I did try refreshing the view. Here is a screenshot:
I classify this behavior as one of the quirks of KiCAD. Beneath the “Visibles” label are two tabs, “Layer” and “Render”. The entries listed in each of those two tabs control some aspect of what does, or does not, get displayed.
I also came to KiCAD after using other layout programs and, like you, I was frustrated by KICAD’s behavior at first. After using KiCAD intermittently for a year I still can’t totally explain the logic of which selection controls what aspect of the displayed image, but I know that if I poke around long enough in BOTH of those tabs, I can make the display show what I want to see (or not see).
Not all of KiCAD’s quirks are frustrating. It looks like you are creating a thermal pad from an array of overlapping rectangular pads. This may be a more efficient way to accomplish that result than other, more common, approaches. (See, for example, the discussions at Badass footprint thread or More via on a pad .) When there is overlap between pads with the same pad number, KiCAD treats them as a single pad. I consider this an especially useful quirk of KiCAD.
Thanks, @Joan_Sparky and @dchisholm, tickboxes under the render tab do, indeed, control whether the front and back pads are, well, rendered.
Solder mask view is also handy to switch on or off, but tickboxes for this does not appear under the Render tab, only the Layer tab. So my question remains: what do the tickboxes in the Layer tab do?
If you draw something on the soldermask layer you will switch that on the layer tab… pads don’t react to those settings really. Don’t ask me why… I have no idea about the inner workings of KiCAD.
My guess is that his tab-pairing has been imported from use elsewhere, because it already exists.
It seems from the word ‘render’ that some control over what was refreshed was offered, as well as what was displayed.
That makes more sense during routing, for example.
Of course, time makes new PCs always faster, so screen refresh times are less of an issue, but things like ‘render’ become a historic legacy.
