Hello all, it is my first time using KiCAD and I love it so far but I encountered a few bugs (or I’m doing something wrong) with the program.
First issue I experienced was inside the 3D viewer. Board was black when I preview it, I went to settings and changed solder mask top/bottom to blue color. Everything was ok but I couldn’t see my traces so I went to change opacity of the layer, and changed it to predefined blue.
After I hit ok on this window, board goes black again and when I went to setting, colors I changed seconds ago were black again:
Why is this happening ?
Another bug I encountered was with adding shapes to board. Adding shapes works, but when I double click to edit shape, let’s say to change circle to filled, and upon pressing OK, nothing happens, dialog window doesn’t close and changes are not applied.
What do I need to do to have write permissions ? I tried to run the program as an administrator but it didn’t help.
Problem is, that settings are saved if I use colors that have 100% opacity, when I lower the opacity level, that’s when the color resets to black.
I’m not sure transparent solder mask colors are supported (well). Solder mask generally should be slightly transparent regardless of selected color. Can you post a screenshot with an opaque color selected? Maybe there’s an issue with your graphics driver/card. Or you just expect it to me more transparent than intended by the developers?
I don’t want a transparent solder mask, I want it to be slightly transparent.
I tried custom colors, but I also tried pre-defined colors such as blue, red, or green. The same thing happens with those colors.
Here is the image with pre-defined red color where opacity is set to 100%:
Okay, never mind, just confused something. For me the opacity slider on the right works fine and it saves the setting across restarts.
Any special localization (e.g. number format) settings on your system?
Can you post the contents of C:\Users[username]\AppData\Roaming\kicad\6.0\3d_viewer.json and 6.0\colors\user.json after setting a transparent color and quitting?(the AppData folder might be hidden by default)
I’m not sure about special localization, if you mean regional settings I don’t think it is something special:
(Not sure if this is what you meant)
Here is the pastebin of 3d_viewer.json and colors file:
Edit: I set pre-defined blue color, saved and exited from KiCAD, and copied the contents of the .json file.
Edit2: For some reason, the color is set to black by the program.
I just give it a try in my system and it works as expected, if I choose to define colors in the 3d viewer preferences, the opacity of the solder mask is set around 83% so it possible to see the traces, I changed from the default green to red and reduced the opacity, closed the application and opened again and the settings were saved as expected.
Pretty strange bug I have here
Here is the version info:
Application: KiCad 3D Viewer (64-bit)
Version: (6.0.6), release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.1.6
libcurl/7.82.0-DEV Schannel zlib/1.2.12
Platform: Windows 10 (build 19043), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW
Build Info:
Date: Jun 26 2022 02:39:06
wxWidgets: 3.1.6 (wchar_t,wx containers)
Boost: 1.79.0
OCC: 7.6.0
Curl: 7.82.0-DEV
ngspice: 37
Compiler: Visual C++ 1929 without C++ ABI
Build settings:
KICAD_USE_OCC=ON
KICAD_SPICE=ON
Edit: Just to point out so that we are on the same page , problem doesn’t happen upon re-entering the app, as soon as I change opacity of the color and click ok, that’s when color of the board changes to black. It looks like color parsing or something else went bad
which define transparent colors. You could try inserting them into your file.
I ask about localization/regional settings, because reading the dot inside the alpha values could be problematic if your region (Serbia?) uses e.g. a comma as decimal separator. (it obviously shouldn’t be a problem, but issues like that have existed before).
If you want, you could try setting the region of your system to english to see if that improves it. Then we would know where the issue is
Please do, directly on the 3d-viewer (Help->About KiCad->Report Bug) I just have a quick look in Gitlab and it doesn’t seem to be any similar issues reported.
Sorry for the late reply, If that plugin needs to be installed after KiCAD installation then no, I don’t have it. I installed only a clean installation of KiCAD, everything that comes pre-packaged is installed and no other plugins nor modifications are installed.