How to draw an irregular border for kicad?

I want to draw an irregular border for my board with kicad. But I found it’s a little hard to draw the border in edge cuts layer exactly. sometimes when i see in 3D view, it will show me as:

KiCad’s line editing capabilities are not the greatest, but it is fairly adequate for simple rectangles and a few rounded corners. It is important that the endpoints of all lines on Edge.Cuts form a closed contour. No loose ends. You can snap endpoints together when you zoom in a lot, and then drag an endpoint until it snaps onto another. KiCad will draw a small circle around the snap point if this happens.

Negative X-coordinates are also unusual. It indicates some line outside of the normal drawing area. Can you zoom in on those coordinates and then see what’s there?

But for more complex PCB outlines, it’s better to design it in some other mechanical CAD program, and then import it in KiCad as a .DXF file.

Complex board outlines I usually draw in LibreCAD. The files are dxf and you can import them in KiCad. But it may well be, you’ll get this error, too.
The solution is quite easy: select View-Drawing Mode-Sketch Footprint Edges and zoom to the coordinates of the message. You will note that the two lines do not end in one point but have a minimal displacement. Just move one point to the other or connect both with a separate segment and it works.

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For drawing the board outline set the grid as big as possible (1mm as example). It makes no sense to have the grid too 10mils or so. With this settings I had never a problem for the outline.

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thanks, i will try LibreCAD.:smile:

It seems a good way, :+1:

yeah, i will try LibreCAD to design the broder. :smiley:

Inkscape can also be used to draw an outline for KiCad.

you may have a look at Kicad StepUp: The Sketcher for Getting to Blinky

thanks for your replay.:smile:

Inkscape is a pretty cool software.

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