My version 8 wishlist

Attach copper shapes to a net - I have worked on several commercial designs that called for circular tracks. The only solution at the moment is to create a circle on the copper layer and then tell the interactive router to ignore DRC violations. Unfortunatly this makes it impossible to do a proper DRC check on the finished board. It would be much better if copper chapes could be added to a net, orfailing that if there could be a special arc and circle track type that lets you control the centre position of the arc.

Aluminium PCB’s in the board stackup - I can’t see any way of doing aluminium backed PCB’s with the current board stackup settings …

Extending the library system to schematic layouts and meta footprints - The hierarchical schematic system is just begging to be formalised into a schematic library system alongside a PCB layout library. I don’t know about other people but I frequently re-use sub units in PCB designs, including PCB layouts (For example for switching regulators or power driver stages) It would be great if you could have schematic layouts in a library system, and link them to PCB layouts in another library - just like how comnponents can link to footprints.

Parametric layout - Parametric driven layouts would also be great, but I realise that its probably a big development goal. Perhaps there could be a compromise step where component layouts can be read from a table, which in turn could be read from a spreadsheet or csv file …

It’s a wishlist, and I don’t want to destroy a wish-thread, so maybe the answer should be split into another topic.

regarding the first point:

2 Likes

Thanks for the workaround tip. I will upvote the feature as suggested.

while discussing about workaround.
The plugin Save Restore layout GitHub - MitjaNemec/SaveRestoreLayout
is quite close to provide reusable block of layout.
I’ve got each block in a separate hierarchical sheet. Then I copy the kicad_sch of the sheet in my project.
And I use the pluging to copy the layout from my reference file to my project.

It’s not perfect. But it’s a lot better than nothing.

But I agree, metafootprint would be great, and library for schematic and layout would be a good solution. But I think, it’s quite a big development.

2 Likes

Thanks, it sounds really useful. I’ll take a look at it.

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