Do you not find teardrops useful there? My boardhouse highly recommends them for the same reason you don’t use 90deg bends: stress concentrators.
A few resources:
http://www.epectec.com/flex/design/
www.aetpcb.com/aet/net_resources/help/Flexible_Circuit_Design_Guide.pdf
Even though it is 2018, I still think teardrops can be useful, and KiCad would benefit from their inclusion.
Flexis are a special case that really benefit from tear dropping.
They are very common in professional and military radios
Good to know there is more applications for teardrops, I use it mostly because of his anesthetic, also the curved traces. The person who makes that video also makes his code public, here: https://github.com/heikkipu/kicad-devel
I hope more people find this useful and more can collaborate with the code 
(a thing I’m far to be able to do)
Wow, impressive.
Via stitching
these features were ‘available’ since about three years ago…
Round Corners & SolderMask clearance
Thanks - in the demo the trace curves seemed more global, and interacted well with shove. (ie did not degenerate into a mess, but curves were removed once isolated).
Shame Teardrops did not make it, as they seem to have been implemented in forks for a long time…
Please forgive me if this is a stupid question but I’ve been using Kicad ver 4 for some time now but couldn’t see this great feature in it, so i installed the latest nightly build today & still can’t see it. What am I doing wrong please?
Many thanks for your patience,
Pat.
Which great feature do you mean ?
Videos above show what is included, (some curves, vias) and Teardrops I think are still (sadly) experimental/excluded.
Hi Pat,
the video with tear drops, round corners and stitching vias is from a forked repo
heikkipu kicad repo at github
the gif of rounded corners, soldermask clearance, stitching vias and via fences are derived from an almost 3 years ago repo
ben kempke kicad repo at github
I aligned Ben repo to the today’s dev repo and the kicad_pcb format is compatible with the actually used
both are out of the main code stream …
In both there are good ideas for the next release… I like a lot the approximation used for rounded curves that makes the trick working without the need to change DRC code 
Hi folks & thanks a million for the fast reply, that’s what open source is all about The feature I really like is the round bends on the tracks, I use KiCAD to do alot of RF Layouts. I’m away until the weekend but when I get back I’ll have a look at that version,
Pat.
A coder needs to put these features on the todo list for v6 or even v5.0.x if it doesn’t involve file format changes, with a code cleanup to meet KiCad standards
Well it seems one reason as to why it will be hard to get this into kicad is because the developer did not use git as intended (He seems to have just copied the source-code into a new repo and started from there. https://www.mail-archive.com/kicad-developers@lists.launchpad.net/msg24282.html Or he screwed up somehow and wiped the git history that way.)
Maybe something else to keep in mind: https://www.mail-archive.com/kicad-developers@lists.launchpad.net/msg27179.html
The important bit from it:
Too answer your earlier question as to why Tom’s zone filling code got merged and yours did not is simple. You seem to be unwilling to cooperate with the lead developers by making changes to your code so that we can get them merged.
And also:
My guess is that with a bit of cooperation on your part, we would have used your code instead of Tom’s. This would have freed Tom up to work on other things and your threaded zone filling code would be in the KiCad development branch.
I am a bit baffled as to why someone would invest time in a project and not help the lead developers to include these nice features into the main codebase. Seems like a huge waste of time. (For everyone involved)
I think the code will also need to be implemented in the new OpenGL/accelerated canvas, looks like it was done in legacy.
Unless a developer steps forward who is willing to work with the lead developers, then we are not really any closer to getting these features in KiCad.
I haven’t followed closely the tear drop’s code, but referring to Ben’s code, he did everything in the right way… he made also 4 different repository to facilitate the merging…
https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg19528.html
Via stitching:
via stitching repo
Via shielding:
via fencing / shielding repo
Round traces:
round traces repo
Mask expansion:
solder mask clearance repo
With the recent changes in vias management, it is possible to merge all his contributions without any changes to kicad_pcb format… Rounded curvers are approximate as segments to be DRC friendly and stitching vias and via fencis are fully compatible with the actual code…
The diff are very limited… it was a pity that was not merged since almost three years ago…
The answer by wayne gives a bit of reasoning. It seems he chose a very bad time to try and get his stuff merged. (During a feature freeze where the lead team is more concerned with fixing bugs then discussing new features. Which i nope is understandable.)
It also seems that at least parts of his implementation did not allow DRC to work properly. (And there where other open questions. I did not follow the whole thread to find out what wayne meant with that particular part of his response.)
There was no follow up from him which might explain why it has been forgotten. (Searching for his name on the mailing list results in only 3 messages. There is no newer message regarding any of these contributions.)
So it seems he sadly lost interest in getting his stuff into kicad. Maybe another developer can take up his work.
I wonder how many other branches are out there waiting to be merged. Standing at nearly finished but not quite there yet, … Lost in time.
Dev here. Your guess was correct:
Cheers,
Tom
please have a deep look at Ben’s mail:
Although I was planning on waiting until after the stable release to polish
these off and get additional input, I figured I’d share them here since
there still appears to be a lot of attention regarding this topic.
Hopefully they will be useful or at least provide some hints as to how
KiCad could implement more RF-centric functionality in the future.
As I pointed out, this is not a problem now… no more need to have ‘NET_LOCKED’ option nor changing in file format…
bad attitude losing this opportunity in contributions…
looking forward to see it in v6 dev release…
So long as it doesn’t affect any file format, it might be possible to add Bens code, with OpenGL support, to v5 once the v5 release is out of the way. Major releases like v4,5,6 allow compatibility changes in format.
Now that v5 is out in the wild, what needs to happen to wrangle these features in?
