Hi!
I last used Kicad at the end of 2014. Now I updated to the current version (4.0.4), started a new project, want to assign footprints to the components… and I only see metric footprints for the resistors and capacitors. I’m from Europe, so I like the metric system as much as the next guy, but the components in my drawer didn’t change over night. What happened to the old footprints with 0.1 inch spacing?
I’m running Arch and I installed community/kicad 4.0.4-1 and community/kicad-library 4.0.4-1.
I’m on KiCad since 4.0, so have no experience with the libraries before that.
As for the resistor footprints in the library “Resistors_ThroughHole.pretty” like “Resistor_Horzontal_RM10mm”, these have metric numbers, but the pins still “sit” on a inch/mil-based grid, so the lead spacing for the “Resistor_Horzontal_RM10mm” is in fact 400 mil / 10,16 mm.
With the capacitors like “C_Radial_D10_L13_P5” from the library “Capacitors_ThroughHole.pretty” it’s different, for the few types I use the holes “sit” on a metric grid, so it seems reasonable to name them in metric units.
I’m not sure about that. All the ones i checked (Capacitor_ThroughHole) have at most 3 significant digits as pad spacing and none of them are divisible by 2.54mm
I think they have been rounded to the nearest 0.05mm
Example: C_Radial_D8_L21_P3.8 has a pin spacing of exaclty 3.8mm. If it would be designed for imperial measurements, i would expect a pin spacing of 3.81mm
@Rotosquash: If you really need imperial spacing you could look in the git history of the libraries. Or make your own library/ search google for one that suits you.
I wonder if this is related to a schematic oddity I noticed, that pins spaced on a standard 100 mil pitch don’t measure correctly when metric measurement is selected. The conversion between metric and imperial is exact intentionally to avoid these problems
Checking, the THT resistors are native metric. There is a good case for having both options available as THT is likely to be used along with 0.1" DIL ICs and connectors