Howdy!
I do a lot of LED boards of various lengths, and one issue I have noticed for a while is that long PCBs seem to have issues rendering selected objects at the extents of the board when zoomed to a certain point… Has anyone else noticed this issue?
Seems like it happens right around the 40 inch mark or so. I have noticed it across multiple versions of KiCAD, but for the record I am on 8.0.2 on Windows.
Video:
Example PCB:
test.kicad_pcb (14.1 KB)
I was able to reproduce this with your “test” PCB with the following steps:
Internally the PCB editor works with 32bit integers and with nanometer resolution. That translates into a maximum PCB size from around -2m to +2m (so around 16 square meters). My best guess is that not many people go to these extreme sizes, and not much testing is done for such big PCB’s.
A few years ago I also encountered some weird behavior in the schematic editor when symbols are placed far outside of the “paper” sized drawing area. I complained a bit about it and it was “half” solved. At the moment, you can zoom out very far, then place a symbol meters away from the drawing area, but then you can’t zoom in at that location at all. When zooming in, the maximum pan distance from the center is limited (to some unknown value). All this was not very important, as such big schematic drawings don’t exist and the issue was left at that.
But now you encounter it on real PCB’s It seems it’s worth to create a bug report for it.
It may also be related to the issue below. That issue is also for the schematic editor, but as far as I know the low level drawing functions have a common code base.
Thank you for the insight there paulvdh! I don’t think I’ll be making anything close to a 16m^2 PCBs any time soon, so the total working area isn’t an issue for me at all. Given what you say - I bet that if I started with the board centered at the default origin rather than starting one end of the board there, I might have more luck working around the issue.
I often am making upwards of 40in long PCBs, but even I have never gone all the way up to 4ft - let alone 4 meters!
I’ll probably still file a bug report in the next day or two, since I think being visible in some cases and not visible in other cases is less-than ideal behavior, regardless!
40" is suspiciously close to 1000mm.
KiCad base unit is nm, so 10^9 nm. The maximum board size is supposed to be 4m x 4m, limited by the use of a 32 bit integer
Edit
I can reproduce this
The trigger seems to be around 1070mm
As you get close to the threshold, you have to zoom in further for the selected footprint to vanish
Raise a bug report with your sample. Repeatable bug reports are very useful, although this might be wx related
I opened this issue
Oh wow, thank you! People like you help to bridge the gap between users’ complaints and actionable work. I gave it a “like”. Much appreciated that you took the time to file the bug report.
The developers quickly closed it, pointing at another issue which finds problems with PCBs > 1.5m
It’s been opened again: two different problems apparently.
At least this one is easily reproducible
The other issue seems to be to do with the overall size available as a PCB.
This is now marked as fixed for V9,
I presume these LED billboards are the main use case for >1m PCBs
See Highlighted footprints vanish when zoomed in on large (>1m) PCBs (#18124) · Issues · KiCad / KiCad Source Code / kicad · GitLab, that one was already merged and the bug can’t be reproduced in master (nightly builds).
Yup - looks like that merge effectively destroyed my issue. Sweet!!!
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