Hi folks, recently made the long overdue jump from Eagle to KiCad. I can see a lot of you are tired of people asking for Eagle features in KiCad, so I’ll apologise now (sorry!) and cut to the chase.
The Miter button (in Eagle). I really miss it. Is there a script or such that does the same in KiCad? I would often select it, set radius to 0.5 and chamfer the corners of about 50 traces in a row, and it was a quick way of unifying and tidying up. I also loved that it worked on 90º corners (created a chamfer where there was none, not just correcting existing chamfers).
The grid in KiCad is friendlier, I can do a lot of grid switching while tidying, but as packages have varying pin pitches I’m left with uneven looking corners regardless of how hard I try to tidy it up.
I also found it useful when modifying the board outline and in some cases even filled planes.
What am I missing? How do you tidy your traces? Is there a better way in KiCad?
Yeah, it’s a toolbar icon in Eagle. Once you hit it, you can select fillet or chamfer (they’re icons, I’m using the terms fillet and chamfer as that’s what it’s often called in other CAD apps), and set the radius. Then you can click on any trace corner (be it right-angled, an existing chamfer or an existing radius) and it’ll make it what you’ve set. And you keep on clicking on trace corners until you’re done. So I’ll do all the traces of one thickness, then increase the radius and do the thicker traces etc.
Why you need to do anything with traces. Do you design very hi, hi and once more hi frequency circuits that you need to avoid any corners in tracks or do you try to make PCB looking like old (hand painted) designs.
What have pin pitches to uneven looking corners?
I’d like to understand and then may be say what are my solutions for these (looking like not existing to me) problems, but unfortunately I leave in less then 2 hours and probably will be 3 days off-line.
So - don’t be surprised if I came back to this subject on Saturday.
When I had to make one more complicated PCB shape I have done it using LibreCAD and importing to KiCad. I have just used this PCB in one my bug-report so you can see it here:
But I was doing this PCB with KiCad V5. I think since then some features were added to KiCad so may be now it will be possible to draw it in KiCad. The problem here is that I’d like to have all arc segments to have exactly the same center and radius and some of them do not contain point at the same X or Y position as center (what would help).
As far as I can see, miter is “chamfer”, two corners instead of one (90 → 2 x 45). Filleting is rounding with arc. Most users want to use 45 degree corners instead of 90 degree.
Reading in hurry and without help of dictionary I just didn’t caught this sense. Words miter, chamfer tells me nothing (‘arc’ I know).
I don’t remember to get 90° track corner ever. When I route they naturally get 45° and I have never had to do anything special to get it. I even suppose that it will be hard to get 90° as after each click track changes by 45°. I’m not using KiCad since half year and am writing from Win7 PC where I don’t have current KiCad to check anything now.
Feeling that the whole text is about rounding corners I understood that ‘uneven looking corners’ in some dependency of pin pitches have also something to do with rounding / cutting (footprint) corners.
If it is not a problem of rounding corners but of positioning than I have also never noticed that problem. All my footprints have courtyard rectangles in 0.1mm raster and when positioning/routing I’m using 0.1mm raster. I position all footprints if possible touching with their courtyard.
My only grievance is not being able to set the radius (for chamfered tracks). The grid can’t always be aligned with package pins for obvious reasons, and that means you get chamfers with uneven radii. As I say, in Eagle, once you set up Miter you can fix every trace on the board with successive clicks in each trace corner, whether the existing chamfer is too big or the corner is at right angles. It’s very quick.
Piotr, it might be a legacy issue but boardhouses used to warn against 90º corners in traces below 0.25mm or so, as they couldn’t guarantee the integrity of the traces in the manufacturing process.
Yes, the software ‘naturally’ creates chamfers as you route, but these can easily be inadvertently removed (or radically enlarged!) if you drag a part or move a trace more than the radius of the chamfer. Before I learnt about the ‘D’ method in this thread, I was deleting parts of my trace and rerouting it, which was clumsy. There had to be a better way, and now I see there is.
