How to Mirror (Y-Flip) Layout Perspective

Layout
1

Is it possible to mirror or y-flip the perspective of the layout? It is something included in most mainstream PCB editors (Cadence, Altium etc), and makes it much easier to debug boards and make comparisons to a real life board on the bottom side (when you turn over a real board, the layout is mirror in the y axis).

Currently I do it by looking at the 3D view, but this doesn’t give you interactivity to hover over tracks/parts and see what your looking at.

Is this possible, and hidden away in menus or a missing feature?

2

I do not know any way to do this on the display screen.

Using the “File” > “Plot” drop-down menu, you can request a mirror-image rendering for Postscript, SVG, HPGL, and PDF output files (but NOT Gerber or DXF!). I have done this once or twice for PDF check-prints, but haven’t tried any of the other file formats.

Dale

3

this is an old thread about that topic

unfortunately it seems this feature is not included in the roadmap atm…

4

That is unfortunate. Is there any way to make a feature request for it?

It seems a fairly trivial thing to add (well ought to be), and is incredibly useful (and considered standard amongst CAD tools).

5

Fast scan of the bugtracker for wishlist items with the word ‘mirror’ in the title/body brings up this:

Which leads to this:

https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg22667.html

So yeah, someone is working on it (or was working on it).
If you really need something in KiCAD and it’s not there you either get the Dev’s on board (must be very convincing and charming :wink: or you do it yourself.
Good luck.

1 Like
6

This is true for every (open source) project.
The advantage of open source is that you are able to add features yourself.
If you don’t have the necessary skills (or time) it is as hard to convince programmers of open source projects as it is to convince developers of a closed source one. (Just try to get this exact feature included in eagle.)

I lost count of how often i thought exactly this at the start of a project. In most cases stuff that seems quite trivial at the beginning is exactly what breaks your neck later on.

1 Like
7

Sometimes users need/wish are taken in charge because also the request is something valuable… (and devs may consider that valuable) so it may worth to ask for…

1 Like
8

If someone wants to test, it’s there:

Cheers,
Tom

1 Like
9

Is there a compiled windows binary to test with?

10

may be @nickoe could have a look if that branch can be built for the test and uploaded?
(i.e @ http://downloads.kicad.org/windows/testing/ )

thx
Maurice

11

@twl, I tried to build a windows build. I tried to merge your branch on top of master (there were a merge conflict). But when I run it and resize the pcbnew window it stops refreshing and eventually crashes. Could you prepare a patch that will apply cleanly on master that I can trigger instead?

12

Hi Nick,

If you’d wait for few more days, it will be in the product repo, along with other rendering fixes (e.g. much faster Cairo backend).

Tom

13

I just tried it on linux, and the cursor movements are also flipped.

14

Hi Nick,

Could you give tom-dev-dec09 a try? It’s already on top of the latest master and contains more rendering bugfixes.

T.

1 Like
15

Hi Tom,
I’ve managed to build the tom-dev-dec09 and it seems to work fine in win10 64b
I only noticed a width problem in the menu

I would suggest, if I can, to add a shortcut for toggle the Flip i.e. Alt+F3 or whatever you consider better…

Anyway, great new feature!
thx
Maurice

16

@twl, yeah, I also noticed the menu problem.

17

Edit component (press E) and then choose “Mirror |”

18

The original question was not about flipping a single component. (The shortcut F does the trick here)
The question was about looking on the pcb from the bottom. This is a feature that has been added to the nightly build version some time ago as already stated by @nickoe . (Warning: using nightly builds is connected to some risks.)