KiCAD bugs or mistakes I made?

LoOdaK · July 11, 2022, 10:27pm

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.

JeffYoung · July 12, 2022, 2:19am

At a guess I’d say you don’t have write permissions to the folder where your settings are saved.

Not sure about editing shapes. That one sounds pretty weird…

LoOdaK · July 12, 2022, 7:08am

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.

Jonathan_Haas · July 12, 2022, 8:29am

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?

LoOdaK · July 12, 2022, 8:52am

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%:

As soon as I change color opacity to just 99%, board goes black.

Jonathan_Haas · July 12, 2022, 9:11am

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)

LoOdaK · July 12, 2022, 9:20am

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.

der.ule · July 12, 2022, 9:36am

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.

Could you share your KiCad version here. (Help->About KiCad->Copy Version Info).


Application: KiCad 3D Viewer (64-bit)

Version: (6.0.6-1-gc8a1c5c707), 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 18 2022 07:32:04
	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

LoOdaK · July 12, 2022, 9:40am

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

Jonathan_Haas · July 12, 2022, 9:56am

Weird. In the colors\user.json, I have lines like

    "soldermask_bottom": "rgba(20, 51, 36, 0.831)",
    "soldermask_top": "rgba(255, 8, 7, 0.161)",

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

LoOdaK · July 12, 2022, 10:11am

Actually, that was the problem, awesome man, thank you so much

I changed regional from Serbian to English (World) and everything works now as expected. And shape editing also works.

Do I need to open an issue somewhere on Github to fix regional formatting or something ?

der.ule · July 12, 2022, 10:21am

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.

Jonathan_Haas · July 12, 2022, 11:07am

This potentially looks like this wxWidgets issue: https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/issues/13077 (but it’s fixed 11 years ago?)

der.ule · July 12, 2022, 11:27am

Mmm very unlikely, it seems more related to this kind of bugs:

but, afaik qu1ck fixed this issue a long time ago and it was affecting other areas as well, not only 3d Viewer.

@LoOdaK Do you have the Interactive HTML BOM Plugin installed? Is it the latest version ?

LoOdaK · July 12, 2022, 3:56pm

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.

I will report the bug now.

system · October 10, 2022, 3:57pm

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.