How to change track width? SOLVED

This may be silly question but how do I change track width ? The minimum is 0.254mm and the selector only offers minimum.

Hi, Roman.

In pcbnew, click on the “Design Rules => Design Rules” main menu item. Click on the “Global Design Rules” tab of the “Design Rules Editor” window that appears. Add the various track widths you would like to use in the “Custom Track Widths” pane in the lower-right of the tab. Then click “OK”. After that, the track widths you entered will appear in the drop-down track-width selector in the main window.

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Thank you.

I ended up defining second class power, but it’s good to know I can have free-hand track widths.

Btw. KiCAD seems to be quite quirky, sometimes I cannot grab a track or when routing it occasionally refuses to go to certain position and when I move the mouse around it eventually allows going there. Most of functionality is via context menus, there is a lot of different context menus and may be a challenge to get correct one. Sometimes I have to go to highest zoom to be able to get trace’s context menu.

I submitted the PCB to the factory, my first from KiCAD. Coming from Eagle, I appreciate how easy it is to generate proper manufacturing files, although I am missing function to generate PCB image as jpg, png, etc.

“Quirky”. That’s a very kind assessment. Every PCB program I’ve ever used is or was a wired-together mess of batshit craziness. But after using one for a while, you absorb the craziness and it seems normal while all the other tools suddenly look even stranger. I used Eagle for years, but now I can hardly do even basic operations when I open an old project. Now I’m always looking for a context menu.

For PCB images (and also schematics), I like KiCAD’s plot function that lets you output SVG. Then I can edit the output file using Inkscape and get high quality drawings at any resolution. From there I can generate the PNG files.

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Thank you for the replies. It’s good to know there is an active community, I will try to contribute my share. I was able to make medium complexity schematic (approx 200 pins) and layout done in under 40 hrs with learning so KiCAD cannot be that bad :smile: I own Eagle 5 Pro myself, but my new employer is startup and I was also looking into either upgrading Eagle or leaving it for my own projects. KiCAD seems similar in functionality, plus is cheaper, plus all data is text files, plus automation interface via mainstream programming languages (unlike Eagle’s own ULP), so seems like a better deal overall, just to absorb the quirks over few smaller designs and I am are there :slight_smile:

Btw. is there any good recent (2013+) book on KiCAD ?

I found the way to print gerbers through gerbview although that does not seem like very good resolution. The second board I am starting today will be fabbed in proto volume using laser transfer paper and T-shirt heat press, so I will have a chance to learn how to print in scale very soon. Btw. I had some issue adding QR code to the silk, it was URL in 400x400px PNG, I used converter utility that comes with KiCAD, but was too big on the board and when scaled down to 200x200, the silk became unreadable, so I removed it. I will look into that in more detail later when I am not trying to send PCB out at 2am in the morning.

What version of KiCAD are you using?

No books that I know of, but I made a bunch of videos available freely here: https://www.youtube.com/user/contextualelectronic/playlists

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jsquaredz, it’s 2013-07-07 BZR 4022-stable on Windows

ChrisGammell, thank you, I will have a look

You really should install the current build. The “stable” release is almost 2 years old, and 1600+ commits behind. Lots has happened since then.

Ok, I donwloaded the bleeding edge commit 5679 from yesterday. It broke my first project where I did not save project-cache.lib, but that was expected. That project is done anyway and gerbers have been already created. I can recreate the cache on another computer and insert into SVN when I need to revise.

PCB editor seems to be more responsive and selection clarification that was unpredictable in old stable release seems to behave better so far. Let me get back to work, this seems like good progress :slight_smile:

Thank you.

Can you report that bug to the KiCAD team? Next stable release is slated for July and obviously upgrades between stable releases shouldn’t break projects.

All, I am new to KiCAD (I used Eagle previously) and am trying my first project which I plan to home etch prior to having the board made professionally and have been struggling to change track width. All the suggestions I found via Googling have not worked. Two minutes on this forum and I found it!

Thanks all.

Z

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You ain’t seen nothing until you used Cadstar. Holy **** that is one weird CAD system. The least intuitive piece of software I’ve ever had the misfortune to have to use.

I used Zuken Visula long ago, CADSTAR always feels wrong, the schematic looks ugly. The not quite Gerber output is a pain

you could also try

for your QR-code

the gEDA PCB format footprints should load fine in Kicad’s pcbnew

In addition, pcb-rnd supports parametric footprint creation during layout editing; so another option is that you could generate a QR-code in pcb-rnd and export as a KiCad layout, and use the kicad module in the exported layout.

Also, gerbv allows gerbers to be exported in various formats, including png, ps, and pdf.

Cheers,

Erich.

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