This plugin path change ignited many comments and also other important information (changes on other platforms) which can be found in the split discussion.
A change in generated gerbers.
Author: jean-pierre charras <jp.charras@wanadoo.fr>
Date: Sat Jan 30 09:59:53 2021 +0100
Use aperture macro for custom pads. Optimize aperture macros for free polygons.
These aperture macros were previously used but only for chamfered round rect.
They are now also used for custom pads (previously drawn as regions).
They are also optimized, i.e. only one aperture macro is created for a given shape.
(previously, one aperture macro was created for each chamfered round rect pad.)
So now all pads are flashed.
Some other changes to pads caused problems with 3rd party software (most notably JLCPB CAM), so you should be aware of this one, too. It depends on the features used on the footprints/layout whether some problems are triggered in other software or not. If you have access to some 3rd party software which reads and and interprets gerbers, please test, or send gerbers with all kinds of pads in several rotated positions to your manufacturer. (Do not disable aperture macros for these tests.)
For new installs (or for when you wipe out your config directory), the hotkey Ctrl+H is changed from the legacy “high contrast” toggle to the new 3-state layer display mode toggle. This will cycle through showing inactive layers normally, dimmed, and off (the old hotkey just toggled between normal and dimmed).
If you don’t erase your config, this change won’t affect you, so I encourage you to consider making this switch yourself in your hotkey preferences:
If you haven’t tried this feature, it’s like the old “hide all layers but active” action available from right-clicking the list of layers, but better: unlike that one, this will keep working as you change layers.
2 Likes
Will the excellent plugins by @maui and others (e.g. StepUp, RF tools, via stitching,…) work with version 6 when all is said and done and ver. 6 is officially released?
Each plugin developer (or someone else) must port the plugin to v6. So, it depends.
ATM there is a big issue on v6 because the code has changed a lot and Vias/Traces are invisible after plugin run. The user needs to save and reopen file to see them, even if they are in the file.
Same issue here:
There are already issues discussed at gitlab, but still open:
issue #5678
issue #7065
Without #7065 closed (solved), nothing could be improved on plugin side.
this broken doesn’t depend at all on plugins developers, but it is a bug/missing feature on k code.
It is all on k devs to decide how approach the python support.
few comments relevant to the issue:
It appears like
BOARD_ITEMSadded via the python interface are never added to the View
really Python programs should not be using BOARD::Add but the normal COMMIT infrastructure is not exposed right now, and I’m not sure the history behind that
Many script need to add items to a board. It allow opportunity to have many “small” feature (On my side, ViaStitching, but many others) developed by the users…
2 Likes
My comment was aimed only at the changed API in general. I’m not familiar with the details or bugs, so thanks for the first hand knowledge, it’s pretty important to know.
(The link there leads to “testing” directory but it seems to have 5.99 nightly builds.)
3 Likes
If there are no issues found, we’ll probably change the main nightly folder to contain msvc builds soon, after they get a few more testers.
How can I do this?
There’s a new tool that lets you convert lines/tracks to polygons/zones/keepouts and vice versa.
I think it’s pretty handy for creating zones from imported DXFs, replicating some copper traces on the silkscreen layer, and things like that.
Using a 5.99 nightly build on ubuntu 20.04 I don’t have any “convert” special tool:
It works on a selection, and if there’s no meaningful conversion possibility for the current selection, the tool can’t be used. For example to convert a continuous polygonal bunch of lines to a polygon you have to select all those lines and nothing else.
EDIT: please everyone, keep further questions, wishes, issues etc. out from this thread, create dedicated threads instead.
2 Likes
@twl committed many smaller or larger changes to the router. It would probably be good to have extra testing. (Again, don’t comment in this thread!) Unfortunately I can’t focus on that right now myself.
KiCad now has icons in an external .tar.gz package. “This file should be installed to ${KICAD_DATA}/resources/images.tar.gz (So, something like /usr/share/kicad/resources/images.tar.gz on Linux)” says Jon. It includes a dark theme, too. At the moment it works on GTK systems (Linux). See the screenshot in New icons in nightly.
Until now the icon data was embedded directly into the binary files. Now it should be possible to change icons sets by just changing the package file.
Dark theme can also be selected in Preferences -> Common.
8 Likes
A couple of new preference settings were added recently in pcbnew (under editing options-> miscellaneaous).
- Refill zones after Zone Properties dialog. (Default: enabled) When enabled, zones get refilled after changing any settings in the zone properties dialog. Disabling this setting can be useful if you prefer to change multiple zone settings and then refilling all zones (since refilling takes a bit of time).
- Allow free pads. (Default: disabled). When enabled, pads can be moved with respect to the rest of the footprint (same behaviour as prior to the change). This defaults to disabled in order to align to what other commercial EDA tools do: you cannot move a pad at all unless you edit the footprint in the library. Some users might still prefer the previous behaviour which is why this option was created.
Note the “Allow free pads” option might not yet have made the cut to the latest nightly.
If you have questions / comments on these new settings, please open a new topic and tag me @Qbort in it 
9 Likes
The track length calculation math and length tuning system got an overhaul to fix some long-standing issues.
Differences between reported length in the message panel and when doing length tuning should now be minimized, and pad-to-die length should work in more situations. We also now correctly discard the length of tracks inside pads. Note that for some pad shapes, you will still see very slight differences in some situations due to how we handle curved shapes, but these should be small enough to ignore.
Note that the Net Inspector dialog still reports incorrect lengths as it uses separate code for calculating lengths that hasn’t been reworked yet to match the new code.
Please raise issues if you find them!
5 Likes
For new installs (or for when you wipe out your config directory), the hotkey Ctrl+H is changed from the legacy “high contrast” toggle to the new 3-state layer display mode toggle. This will cycle through showing inactive layers normally, dimmed, and off (the old hotkey just toggled between normal and dimmed).
If you don’t erase your config, this change won’t affect you, so I encourage you to consider making this switch yourself in your hotkey preferences:
If I install 5.99 - while I have 5.1.8 installed and I haven’t added environment variables - does that count as a new install?
Yes, nowadays different major version configurations are independent. It’s possible to migrate old settings to a new installation in the first start, but you can choose to start from scratch.
But please ask questions in separate threads – this one is meant for announcements.
1 Like
We have now some estimates for the last two planned “feature freeze exception” features.
Seth posted about the python API. “We are almost there”, although I won’t try to interpret that exactly.
In another thread Qbort told that curves in polygons may be ready within a couple of weeks.
In real life we may have these available within a month or more, but even with well educated realism there’s a good chance that within some weeks, not months, we will have all features there and only bugfixing is left.
In yet another mail thread Wayne revealed that he wants v6 out within 3 months or less. That would really be something!
Of course the real schedule depends partly on bug reporting. It would probably be better to find and report all bugs at once rather than one by one over time. The more users adopt 5.99, at least for testing purposes, the better. It’s still buggy, but if someone can take a risk of some lost work hours and can recover from data loss 5.99 is soon ready for non-critical work.
Curved polygons is the last feature which affects the file format. There’s still a very small possibility for bug fixes for the file formats; othewise the nightly builds will soon be both backward and forward compatible with other nightly builds from day to day, so it should be possible to downgrade to work around some newly introduced bug.
4 Likes
Plugin manager is also feature freeze exception and I’m about 90% done with implementation, at least on kicad application side.
5 Likes
Thanks, I totally forgot that! Because this may affect people who consider trying 5.99 I have to make exception to my own rule “don’t ask questions here”. Can the plugin manager affect projects in any way, or are the file changes only in application level (configuration etc.)?