Hi, in Pcbnew I’ve imported an irregularly shaped outline on my Edge Cuts layer. Basically it’s just a square, but with some “arms” sticking out in each corner. A design typically used for PCBs in small drones.
My problem is that when I route a trace from one arm to another it will suggest to lay the trace outside of the boards edges. I’d like the routing to understand where the edges of the board is. Also, the DRC check doesn’t complain about traces or components placed outside the boards edges, which would have been nice.
Is there a good way to get the behavior I want? Perhaps using keepout-areas in a smart way?
It is a problem with PCBnew. A workaround is to add keepout zones outside the Edge cuts. It’s not ideal as it still allows you to route off the board, but at least you will get DRCs.
I have also been tripped up by this behavior. When routing near irregularities in the board edge I put down extra inflection points (or are they called “anchors”, or maybe just “corners” in KiCAD?) to force the route inside the edge cut, then manually clean up the trace paths by dragging the segments.
It’s puzzling to me that the dynamic routing algorithm doesn’t respect the edge outline, and DRC doesn’t catch outline violations, but filling a copper zone seems to follow the edge cut perfectly.