Please help, I must have accidentally clicked on something, and I can’t figure out what it was. When drawing a trace, it now automatically completes and creates strange paths, see the attached image.
Looks like you are drawing a zone.
Try the “X” shortcut key.
In KiCad we call them “tracks” (the usual interconnection between pads.)
1 Like
Looks like you’ve switched to curved track corner mode.
Press Ctrl+/, or use context menu to cycle between modes:
Time for the “What, Huh??!” school of factfinding…
I am curious about this one…I have never switched track corner mode.
I have just now tried CTRL+/ (and also the context menu) while routing a track and I cannot tell that it does anything. (??) Do you apply a mouse click to get a corner and get a curve instead? What am I missing?
I’m not sure, can you post a screencast of how you’re trying to do it?
Thanks. The below is a .gif and you may need to click on it to get it to run. First I route a track with two angles (clicks) in it.
Then I delete that track and start a new one. I then use the context menu to try to change Track Corner Mode. I route the track again and see no difference in result or behavior.
These corner modes do not work in Free angle mode. You can disable it (or switch to Shove or Walk around modes):
You can access this dialog by right-clicking the route tool icon:
1 Like
Ahhh; that does it. Thanks!
I do not like spending money for my angles, so I guess I will stick with free angle mode. 
I guess I normally use free angle mode. One may think that I tend to be drunk when I lay out my pcbs. But they usually work OK!!
Seriously I guess it does not look too bad if I zoom according to the snap grid when routing tracks.
You’re missing out on the Shove and Walkaround features though if you use Free angle mode.
Those features…I just gave them a quick try and I think I have tried them previously once upon a time. Perhaps that is a matter of personal MO. One thing is that I do not do a lot of high density stuff. I do have to fight with some fine pitch controller ICs, but beyond that I mainly stick with 0603 and larger.
Perhaps a main thing…I also do not use netclasses much. Mostly I do what looks right and I do tweak spacings occasionally. Recently I was looking at a board I had done a couple of years ago and said, “Hmmm I guess that space there is tighter than what I intended. Tighter than I usually would use.” But it works OK.
May be this might help better to describe the issue. You can see I already drew a lot of the PCB without any issue. What I want to do draw track around the pad 30 (+5V).
Making track issue
I’ve identified the issue. Somehow, the grid was unintentionally switched to 25.4000 mm (1000 mils). I’ve now set it to 0.1000 mm (3.94 mils) because I don’t recall the previous setting. Even when I open an earlier version of the project, it displays the last value set in KiCad, not the one specific to the project.
2 Likes