I would be very grateful if someone could help me over TeamViewer or similar.
I have a lot of questions that come up while I draw.
I have decision anxiety.
Need help getting things placed exactly.
For example this:
What is appropriate, etc.
Thanks in advance
Copying the coordinates is unnecessarily complicated. You can select the line, a quare at the end will appear. Grab that square and join it to the arc. a circle will appear. drop it.
But is it corect way of creating a rounded corner?
And if I regret the radius, how do I change it?
Drawing such graphics is much easier if you simply work on a grid. I would draw those on a 1mm grid, which makes it very easy to line things up.
Also, if you drag one of the end points of an arc around, then you also change it’s radius.
I would not use [F] for flip. Flip is for moving stuff between the front and back side of the PCB. Even though lines (and arcs) on Edge.Cuts will stay on that layer, you still only get two orientations. Use [R] from Rotate instead.
As long as you snap the end points of the lines and arcs together, it will be a valid outline, even when the lines are not perfectly horizontal or vertical and there will be small differences in the radii of the arcs.
Malformed Courtyard
The Courtyard layer is for “reserving” space on the PCB for each footprint, so they can be placed with automated equipment. For this, the rules for the courtyard layer are very similar to Edge.Cuts. Very likely the person who made the footprint for the arduino PCB placed the connectors on it, and together with that the lines of the courtyard layer for those connectors, and those lines overlap. To fix it, load the footprint in the Footprint Editor, and change the lines on the couttyard layer so they do not overlap or intersect. Snap the endpoints of lines together, just like for the Edge.Cuts layer.
First you should draw the rectangle (straight lines) so that they are in some meaningful grid. You seem to have coordinates like 100.123456 mm. You will never have a chassis which needs finer than 0.1mm, and most probably it will be more coarse, like 0.5 or 1 mm. Then you can do it as you showed in your video, but so that the two arc ends will be exactly on the two straight lines. Then shorten the two straight lines so that they snap to the arc end points. You should be very anxious about your current board because the lines aren’t horizontal/vertical anymore. When you use a proper grid and lengths and dimensions, they will be.
Here’s one example.
I do not know how to explain this. But I will try.
The original “Arduino Mega Shield file” is as large as the Arduino, outer edge. I want my shield to be as small as possible so that there is no interference on the PCB that the shield will connect to. When I started drawing, the original shield had a grid. I think it has been moved by me.
Sure I can change the grid but where should the origin be? If I change, how do I place the origin then?
I think that is what I did to creat the arc. But if I want to change the arc radius after I have moved on, do I have to start from the begining then?
I see thanks.
But I want the them to be perfectly horizontal and vertical. I onlu want to mak perfect rounded corners, and be able to change them if I change my mind.
Is that the Pink line?
See it is very hard for me to explain:
I have a shield that I have worked from, I have not and don’t want to make every thing from scratch.
As said before: Set your grid to something easy, like whole millimeters. Then you can just count 4 grid dots if you want things 4mm apart.
If you want multiple connectors for an inter-board connection, it is important to have the same relative position on each PCB. And the simplest way to make those perfect is to use a coarse grid. Then alignment is either perfect, or it’s so far of it’s easily visible. Also: mate the connectors into each other before you solder them. This improves further alignment and also prevents them from being slanted.
If you first make a selection, then right click on it you can: Special Tools / Move with Reference
I think Eelik missed that you adjusted the endpoints of the arcs to fall on the lines before you moved the endpoints of the lines to the endpoints of the arcs. But why do it so complicated? Just use a grid of whole millimeters for both the PCB outline, and connector alignment.
But If I just want to put the mounting hole 4mm from the corner on each side of the PCB edge, how do I do that, the easiest way?
Other thing I don’t understand: Why dose this input 5V and otput 5 volt want to be toghether? - YouTube
Why dose input 5V and output 5V want to be together?
That’s unfortunate if things aren’t on a reasonable grid there. Next time try to make sure from the beginning that they are. (I notice we post about the same things with Paul and make partly the same points… I hope it’s more helpful than confusing.)
There are a couple of good tools/tool combinations which help in putting things in certain places.
First, you can use the “local origin” which is set by simply pressing the space bar. The dx/dy coordinates in the bottom of the editor window change to 0,0. Then you can see the location relative to that point when you move the mouse. When you (again) have things in a reasonable grid, putting items to a location relative to some point is easy.
Then there’s the Position Relative To tool.
I had a reference point in the middle of the circle. Then I can select the circle and give coordinates relative to it. I could have used the same Local Origin directly because it was in the same place. After moving the mounting hole it’s located in 5,-5 from the circle/local origin.
The problem is not to place things offset from origin it is to place things offset from 2 edges of the board. What is also hard is if I have made a rounded corner I can’t place the marker in the corner, especially if I have changed origin. I guess I could remove the rounded corners and make them square again, move the holes and make rounded corners at last, but then if I want to change anything I can’t with out doing the hole process again.
I am very confused about origin.
Did any one of you understand why 5V in and 5V out wanted to connect. I can’t understand why?
I think I have figuered out how to do but I’m not not sure I’m doing right or why I could not do this yesterday. But in any case, it seems to do a little as I want. I will show how I did so you can judge if I do the right thing:
Sory for long video:
I watched about half of the video. Again the not-on-a-reasonable-grid coordinates work against you, but you found an innovative solution. Otherwise you haven’t used the features of KiCad to their full potential.
I think I understood very well what you wanted, but my instructions weren’t detailed enough. For example, let’s take the imaginary corner point which you need to use as a reference. Assuming that the grid and the locations of items this far are sensible (your grid origin does it), it’s easy to find and mark the corner by using the space bar. Then you can use that local origin as the reference point for the moving operations. You can see the relative coordinates directly in the bottom message bar, or you can open the Position Relative To tool and use it there.
See the next video. It relies on 0.5mm grid and everything (relevant) uses that grid. Here is what I do:
Then the corner rounding. I show how I have done it. You can see a couple of tricks here.
First, keep the lines horizontal/vertical. Using a large grid pitch helps if it’s possible. But you can change the “horizontal/vertical” vs. “free angle” mode using Shift + space bar (you can see the keyboard and mouse presses in the overlay in the video). Then you don’t have to try to keep it horizontal/vertical at the same time when you make the line longer/shorter.
Then create the arc. Grab it from one end point and move it so that it overlaps one line. I changed the grid to smaller and moved the arc back a bit to demonstrate it’s not too difficult even when the grid doesn’t help so much. Now I grab from the other end, but instead of moving it to its final place with mouse, I use the arrow keys. You can move with small steps without accidentally moving in wrong direction which would spoil the already set x or y coordinate.
(Another small trick, not seen in the video, is to start the move operation with M, then press an arrow once in the wanted direction, and then you can use the mouse so that it moves only in the horizontal/vertical direction set by the arrow press.)
Finally, change the length of the lines again. It’s easy because the ends of the arc are now in their places and KiCad shows the crosshair mark there and the line end which you are moving snaps there.
Big thanks, really good tip.
But all this is possible because you have a perfect grid and origin.
I think the ardunio shield is something like 53.340mm or something. That makes it more difficult.
If you open the arduino mega template and messuer it is not half mm.
How would I do then?
Just make the outline of the arduino thing narrower, and round it of to 53mm.
Or make it 55mm if you like that better. It really does not matter much how big the PCB is, unless it has to fit exactly with something else, and even then making it 0.34mm smaller is unlikely to have a significant effect.
If you have some identifiable point of some object there which can be used as a snapping point, it should be possible. Setting the grid origin (not the temporary “local origin”) like you did is a valid way to work, although not without its problems. Read Coordinate system, grid and origins in the PCB Editor, maybe it helps to understand that better.
Sure, if everything in the design is on a grid which you can’t find – you should find both the origin and the grid pitch to change the grid so that everything is on the current working grid, and even then not everything may be on the same grid – it will be difficult because you have to use some trick for every new task. Sometimes you may be forced to work with a bad design. I have also made mistakes with my outlines and used several grids for the same design, which forced me to do extra work later.
Here’s a video with an Arduino Uno template from KiCad, the upper left corner modified. I placed the grid origin in a place where nothing here is on grid. So, how to find that corner again so that it can be used as a reference point?
I used the Shift+space h/v mode again. See how the alignment tool (with red dashed line) works. It lets me find a reference point for the x location of the moved line end point. Now I can find the crossing point of the two lines again, and use it later as reference. I could for example add another item there so that it won’t get lost (this is a “leader dimension”).
