I have a board design in KiCad PCBNew 8. I have placed the grid origin point in the lower-left part of my PCB, yet the Dx and Dy on-screen coordinates do not change. This is important because KiCad uses the upper-left corner of the sheet as (0,0), and I need to generate .POS files for components relative to the lower-left corner of the edge-cuts layer.
Anyway, I placed the grid origin point in the lower-left corner of the edge-cuts layer, but it seems to make no difference both on-screen with the cursor position (Dx, Dy), and it makes absolutely no difference in the .pos file—regardless of whether or not I select “use drill origin.”
I am using the “place origin point” icon to place the origin. Any help would be appreciated.
Keep left mouse button on this icon pressed some longer time to select “Place origin point for drill…”. It is this one that should be at bottom left of your PCB.
I’m sorry I don’t understand. Can you kind of explain it a little bit more? There is a “long click” that changes this function? That’s kind of new to me for windows. Is there another way to set it as the drill origin? What did I set if what I set t was not the drill origin? It looks like I set something, circle with a plus in it, but I’m not sure what it is that I set.
Screen height is limited so some similar action icons are grouped together. Long click at such icons shows all of them.
I have never used what paulvdh showed you from menu but it looks (I don’t have KiCad at hand to check) there you have Drill/Place File Origin all the time visible.
OK I got the drill origin to work – thank you - next question, what is the function of “Place grid origin” ?? How do I use dx -dy at the bottom middle of the
Grid is just for the grid, and grid origin is just a point. It is not used as a real “origin”, unless you also change: Preferences / Preferences / PCB Editor / Origins & Axes / Display Origin, and set that to Grid origin.
X/Y and dx/dy are two totally independent measuring systems.
X/Y measures the distance from the top left corner of the page to the cursor if the “Page Origin” display is selected.
X/Y measures the distance from the placed “white” Grid Origin Target to the current position of the cursor if the “Grid Origin” display is selected
X/Y measures the distance from the “Red” Drill/place file Origin Target to the current position of the cursor if the “Drill/place file origin” display is selected.
dx/dy measures the distance from the position of the cursor when the keyboard “space bar” is pressed to the current position of the cursor.
Jmk is right in his latest post, but still his first sentence in the previous post isn’t right:
Grid Origin is the zero position of the Cartesian or Polar co-ords. for the values of X & Y at the bottom of the screen.
That’s not the original [hah! pun intended] purpose of the Grid Origin. In v6 it became possible to use the Grid Origin as the visible coordinate origin, in Preferences → Origins & axes. The FAQ article explains the older use case for the grid origin. But some users would never change the grid origin for the sake of the grid, and in that case it’s good for using as the visible coordinate system origin.
To see X,Y related to my PCB center I just moved (it was KiCad 4.0.7 when you had absolute origin fixed at top left sheet corner) with all my designs to have top-left sheet in center of my PCB.
And I’m still working there as i don’t want to have absolute coordinate measurement being fixed to drill origin (that I want to the down and left of PCB) or grid origin that I prefer to be able to temporarily set as I want.
See reported by me issue related to this (only related - not directly this subject):
