Kicad Some Update Need

Hello,

I use kicad for a long time at my company. I usually worked under 30V DC circuits. However sometimes i need to design power board. But i saw some lack in kicad.

These are;
-tear drop,
-clearance matrix,
-global pad to pad clearance,
-highligt in eeschema,
-hide gnd ratsnets in pcbnew

Especially “clearance matrix” is very important for us. Will we see this features in next time?

Thanks for interest…

Good work. We love kicad…

A general note: This is only a user forum. Users of kicad try to help each other to solve problems with the current software. (And occasionally discuss ideas about the future of kicad.)
If you want to get the attention of the developers you really need to make a bug report marked as “wishlist” if it is a feature request.
Report your feature request here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad
How to: https://kicad.org/help/report-a-bug/

Just a hint: The better you document your feature request the higher the chance to get the attention of developers. Also getting a lot of other people interested in your feature helps.
What helps the most is supplying a patch that adds your feature. (This means hiring a programmer that implements it or doing it yourself)

Now to your requests.

Already exists in nightly. (Will exist in v5)

There are python scripts for that.
Example: Yet another Python teardrop script. Adds and deletes teardrops to a PCB. V0.3.3

Well i think there are plans to make drc better. But again if you need it now, you might need to make your own python scripts or help out by programming it. That’s the benefit of open source. You can implement features you miss.

“Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.”
—Richard Stallman

I would say: hide ratsnets of nets chosen by the user. This would allow the maximum flexibility and i don’t think it is much more effort than hiding one specific net.

1 Like

FWIW, from the good old days of PADS I remember it had a selection-filter, i.e. you select from a list what type of items the normal mouse-pointer can drag/move/modify. That was quite useful - now I many times grab on to a reference-text, component-value text, or pad, or something else, when I actually want to select a footprint.
anyone know if this is in the pipeline? or already done?
thanks.

Being able to (temporarily) lock all pads would be good, all too often I have nudged a footprint, without noticing what I have done, while tidying a few tracks