How would one go about measuring the total are of all components in a design? This is to decide the board size before placement. Usually a conservative 60% is preferred
I hereby certify that I am not simply asking someone else to design a footprint for me.
This is an auto-generated message that is in place on the “footprints” section of the KiCad.info forum. If I remove it and ask for a footprint to be designed anyway, I understand that I will be subject to forum members telling me to go design my own footprint or referring me to a 3rd party footprint site.
Hmmm… Sum up the court yards? I’m not sure why you need to know the board size before placement unless you have an unusually shaped board? On a ‘normal’ rectangular board changing the board size on the edge cut layers is easy enough.
When you 1st import a circuit into the PCB tool, all components are grouped together so you could draw a crude rectangle around them and do an x*y (or as hermit says, sum the courtyard)
You can, for example, have few cases to select one of them.
My BOM creation goes through my spreadsheet database. If I be needing such information I would just added there a column with each footprint size so be able to get sum of them from BOM.
I usually start by sorting the footprints in little groups, such as put all the footprints for the SMPS circuit together. After that I place those blocks close to each other in roughly the shape I want the board to be (round, square, rectangle etc). Also make sure connectors are oriented properly. After that stage you got a pretty good idea of the PCB size and you can draw the outline on Edge.Cuts.
This seems to be the best option available for now. We had been using CADSTAR, which gave the answer as a percentage of the board space. Guess would have to get used to the excel method now
In past I have been describing my BOM generation method. But I have created it with KiCad V4 and still use just because it works well for me. I didn’t looked into new data-base features added in KiCad later.
