How do you join lines to a right angle?

[Kreatronik]

Hey,
I need to create a custom panel and am now at the point, where I want to create a corner here at these intersecting lines:

How would you do it?
And I mean exactly.
Because with pulling on the lines’ grabbing points I can’t drag one line and snap it to the other’s snapping points that it is perfectly at the intersection.

Cheers,
Hannes

Update:
When I put a rectangle into the design and align it with either of the lines’ endpoints like this

and then try to drag the middle point of the rectangle’s line, the pink snap reference is shown, but the lines are not aligned

Is that a bug?

[paulvdh]

KiCad’s drawing capabilities are still limited for things like this. I thought that KiCad V9 could do something with intersection points, but a brief search though the manual did not show something obvious.

One way to do it is to use copy & paste to copy the x coordinate from one line into the y coordinate of the other line. (Hover over a line and press e to edit it’s properties)

[Piotr]

@Kreatronik

How would you do it?

I have never done such things with higher precision than 0.01mm so I always use snap to grid.

[eelik]

How to snap to the intersection of lines?

[Piotr]

After my previous post I spend 10 minutes searching where (in V8) edition of User Grid was hidden. I saw I have User grid defined with different X and Y accuracy but could’t find where did the editing go.

Until I found that now I can have many defined by me grids so there is no User Grid edition but there is a way to add new grid definition.

You can use down to 0.0001mm grid. I can’t imagine me needing higher than this precision at PCB.

[RaptorUK]

@Kreatronik

And I mean exactly.

• Get the X coordinate of the vertical line from it’s properties,
• edit the properties of the horizontal line changing it’s right most X coordinate to the same as the one for the vertical line,
• note the Y coordinate for the horizontal line, edit the properties of the vertical line and change it’s lower Y coordinate

(essentially the same as what Paul said above . . .)

[Kreatronik]

That’s the best compromise.
And you only need to change the end coordinate of one line. Because then you can just drag the end of the other line to the point

[paulvdh]

I forgot
Eelik linked to an older post of mine, but that is “Post-V8” and I’m still on V8. I probably wrote that just after I read:

Post-V8 New Features and Development News

In the PCB editor, there is now an at-cursor indicator showing what exactly the cursor is snapping to, which also now includes intersections between lines, circles and arcs: This can be useful when constructing geometry. For example, you can draw a hexagon: [image] More importantly for footprint drawing, it is easier to make something like this using just a couple of construction lines and circles: [image]

If that snapping works, then you can

1. Draw a “guide line” from the intersection to any other coordinate.
2. Drag one endpoint of your rectangular line to that end point.
3. Drag the endpoint of the other line to the same end point.
4. Delete the “guide line”.

But I also agree with Piotr. I usually draw PCB outlines in increments of whole mm. Or to 0.1mm. I see no need to be more precise then that for “normal” PCB’s. If it’s not easy to draw with the simple tools KiCad has, then using a mechanical CAD software and then importing the results into KiCad is a better option.