Hi all,
I’m currently working on an FTDI breakout board which breaks out all bus signals to 2 ribbon connectors. I’m trying to length match all of the traces on a per bus basis. I’m wondering if there’s a plugin or a way to automatically export trace lengths for specific nets to a file.
The main reason for this is that there are 32 signals total, on both sides of some level shifters, so 64 total. Manually having to write out all 64 trace lengths to a file by hand seems inefficient.
Edit:
Here’s a screenshot of the board to add some context:
The plan is to list out all of the 32 bus traces, before and after the buffer. To allow length matching the whole length.
NB: The trace length matching for this particular board likely isn’t too critical as max clock speeds aren’t that high (tens of MHz at most). I’m trying to get it right for this board though as I’ll be moving on to the FT601Q which clocks the bus lines at 100MHz, so the techniques used here will transfer across.
I’m still using version 7 but, this info should still apply…
What you want is already in Kicad (there’s a button in the panel to click to save the report)
If wanting a Plugin, see this…
Thanks for your reply, I’ve not yet found the functionality you mentioned. The plugin also doesn’t quite do what I want. I want to be able to export a group of nets with their individual trace lengths to file.
For example exporting all nets in a specified netclass such as all nets in the FTDI_BUS netclass:
If it’s possible to do this within Kicad as you mentioned then that’d be awesome. If you’d be able to point me to where in the UI even for Kicad 7 I should be able to translate it to the Kicad 9 UI.
See in the video, the bottom right corner of the Net Inspector panel… that button exports what you want…
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Ah my apologies, I had only watched the start of the video assuming it only applied to one net. I had previously found the net inspector tool, but I had dismissed it as there’s no create report functionality there in Kicad 9 as far as I can see.
The net inspector is no longer a pop out window, but an extra panel that has to be enabled in the view tab. Then it shows up in the window as:
I do prefer the way it worked in version 7 now I can see it side by side with 9. I wonder if the create report functionality got missed when that change occurred, or potentially it’s hidden somewhere else now. Thanks for pointing me to the fact the functionality exists, as now I can go searching for it.
Edit: I found it, it’s in the sub menu for that pane (under the blue wrench) as “Save Net Inspector Report”. That looks to give me what I need. Thanks for your help, I wouldn’t have found it otherwise.
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