That the primary origin would be based on the “paper” instead of the board just makes no sense to me, particularly by release 5.1.12 which is the latest release I can use on my computer. I have read all the related topics suggested, and none were useful.
If you guys really want this program to become popular, you have to have things as fundamental as the origin correct out of the box and easy to correct if they ever get off the norm (which is having the %$#& origin at the corner of the pcb for both the drills and the user grid.) I don’t believe there is a board house on the planet that cannot deal with having the origin at the corner of the board.
If you ever do generate a fix for this, I think it would be good to change the origin to the lower left corner instead of the upper left corner. It may be natural at the upper left for some from some technical backgrounds, but it is un-natural for about 95% of your potential users, and 99+% were taught the lower left in grade school through graduate school. This deviance from the norm changes the popularity of the tool because it effects the new users the most.
The other thing I want to rant about is the simple track setup out of the box. Unbelievable how frustratingly bad it is. I eventually found a setup that is almost functional, but too many hours spent with a terrible setup and too many knobs to turn to try to dial it in to semi-usable. I never saw a post that described my usable setup.
(Aside. On my system “g” works better than “d” for drag. Go figure. I accidentally tried “g” because I had been using LTSpice recently, and it uses “g”.)
So how the tracks get laid down and the origin, both a mess out of the box. That is 2 too many fundamental things being screwed up out of the box for this program to ever gain a broad use, and talking 500 miles an hour doesn’t make that any better.
Oh… and the “Zoom to Selection” only works every other time. I don’t mean randomly… I mean literally every other time. Another key feature that is used all day long that does not work right.
Kicad is a wonderful gift that this is free, but it could be sooo much better.
5.1.12 is 3 major versions out of date and no work has been done on it for a long time (in Internet terms) now. Perhaps you might be able to upgrade your hardware and OS to see if the 8.0.x series works better for you.
My system at work is Windows 7. I am stuck with it for now.
5.1.12 is the latest version of KiCAD that works with Windows 7.
Many people stick with Windows 7 because Windows 10 coincides with a move to rental-only software almost across the board, including other CAD systems as well as MS Office and Windows 365. If Microsoft had come up with a reasonable price for this forced rental mode, it would be a different story, and there would not be such a large base of people holding out. Comes with the territory here with a free CAD system such as KiCAD.
Further, I’m pretty sure they never fixed these fundamental problems in future versions of KiCAD.
You sound pretty confident without having tried later versions. Sorry to hear about the Windows problems; comes with the territory. If you search EEVblog some guy has worked out an unsupported way of getting recent KiCad versions to run on W7, maybe such a solution is warranted. Good luck.
There are several flavors of Virtual Machines that can run Kicad.
VirtualBox is one of the longest-standing and well documented (and used). I still use it on my Mac to run Windows7 (and 10). It’s Free! and made by Oracle
That is about where I lost interest in your post and skipped to what sort of responses you get with that attitude.
KiCad V6 alone has 3 years of development in it. KiCad V6 was released about a month after V5.1.12 but the difference between those two is huge. The only reason a V5.1.x was released is because it took so long go put all those new things in KiCad V6. After the release of V6 the KiCad designers decided to have yearly mayor version updates, but with fewer new features each. But still there are some 70+ new features in a mayor KiCad release.
Indeed, see Coordinate system, grid and origins in the PCB Editor. I don’t see any reason to continue this thread. If you can’t, don’t want or otherwise won’t actually try to use the latest version to see which actually has changed, you are not entitled to say
Please come back after you have cooled down and start a new thread. Threads like this one seldom end in any place near useful.