Post-v5 new features and development news

Some people have hated KiCad’s arc tool. This new feature may help in some use cases: it has a dragging point in the middle of the arc.

2019-06-18_20-47-58
Sometimes it moves a bit arkwardly.

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Try out the delete tool (trash-can icon at bottom of toolbar).

Is this a V5.X.x nightly, or V6.X.x nightly?

I think V5 and V6 nightlies should have their own separate threads.

This topic is about pre V6
V5.1.x will not be getting new features, just bug fixes

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Right, everything here is about the “master” branch which will later become 6.0. There’s not much reason to keep a similar thread for 5.1.x, although it would be good to have a changelog list of fixed bugs. But that development can be followed almost as easily by reading the git commit log although the messages can be somewhat cryptic sometimes.

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Rene’s option (1) from: Filled zone cuts corner of mask on square pads will be in the next nightly.

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Eeschema’s delete-tool-highlighting has also spread to LibEdit, ModEdit, Pcbnew and PlEditor.

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Oh, and thermal reliefs for custom pad shapes. (Note: it doesn’t try to be too smart. It’ll either be useful for a particular shape or it won’t. But that’s kind of the nature of the game for custom pad shapes.)

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I assume the bug report is https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/1563744/comments/23:

Option 1 (cyan) Use the same center point for the mask rounding as for the copper pad rounding. This would be how the copper clearance is calculated right now. -> smallest possible area for copper and mask clearance.

Correct.

(The forum tells me my reply must be at least 20 characters. Sigh.)

2 posts were split to a new topic: Pre V6 net name issue

Until now it has been possible to handle the same project with both 5.1 and nightly builds provided that you manually deleted “max_error” line from the pcb file which was put there by the nightly builds. Some new features are incompatible (chamfered pads, hatched zone filling) but if you don’t use them they don’t affect files.

Now it looks like the branches will soon diverge too much to be even semi-compatible. See https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg41324.html.

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It would be nice if KiCad had some kind of input filter and log errors during file read for non-supported features. This would make the file reads more robust.

@seth suggested an ‘incompatibility report’ for issues like this on the developers forum - https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg41078.html - which sounds like a good idea.

The minimum required C++ version for the compiler has been set to C++14. If you have a system (which is still supported by its makers) with only a C++11 you can tell the developers in the mailing list, but only the platforms which are offcially supported by KiCad are supported :slight_smile:

If you have a build system set up but haven’t compiled for a while, now is the time.

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Has anyone considered versioning all paths so multiple versions can be installed at the same time? I’d like to experiment with the nightlies but don’t want it to impact my v5 installations.

What’s the easiest platform to build kicad on? I’ve tried the osx build scripts (https://github.com/KiCad/kicad-mac-builder) many times on different code bases, but never managed to build it, or if I hacked the scripts/cmakefiles to finish they wouldn’t produce anything that worked. (Read: didn’t immediately segfault.)

Yes, see Running several KiCad versions on the same Windows machine.

Please open a new thread for this, it’s a larger topic.

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Pcbnew -> Inspect -> Show Board Statistics
image

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Nice!
It would be also useful to have a list/check of annular rings

It has been several years since a PCB fab charged me per via.
What would be useful would be a simple summary of drill sizes used.

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