Nixie footprint

[paulvdh]

@Graham1904

IN-14

I had a short peek at a datasheet for that. Apparently the pins are on a circle with a radius of 11mm, pin spacing is regular (those 27.7 degrees) and thus not a full circle.

KiCad can display polar coordinates:

But this does not seem to work for pad placement. You can generate a circular array (First place one pad, then right mouse button popup and: Create from Selection / Create Array.

Lines can be set with polar coordinates. So one option is to:

1. Draw some lines with the right length and angle.
2. Snap the grid origin to an endpoint of a line (Snapping system is a bit complicated in KiCad).
3. Place a pad at that location.
4. Repeat for the other pads.

This little test fitting tutorial I wrote 7 years ago may also be of interest:

[tutorial] Test fitting Footprints

A small demo to show how I test fit footprints. It’s a combination of a few things to make it work perfectly. The first step is to print a PCB mirrored on a piece of Paper: PcbNew → File → Print → Options Mirror → Print. 2nd step: Take a needle and pre-punch all the mounting holes into the paper. (For the large holes I used a hole punch). 3rd step: Carefully put the connector into the sheet of paper. 4th step: Take a picture or scan the whole contraption with a flatbed scanner. This make…

I had a little peek at: Footprint Editor / File / Create Footprint / Circular Pad Array and created the screenshot below, But from what I can see, it always assumes the pads are on a full circle. I don’t see a start and end angle as retiredfeline implied.