At the moment I am working on a 3/4 KiCad project. I draw the schematic and do the footprint placement on the PCB, but no routing of tracks (at the moment), because I will (at first) hand solder it from small PCB modules, IDC headers and other stuff that mostly fits on the 2.54mm raster of matrix board.
Because of the natural 2.54mm grid of matrix board I also want to keep all the modules and connectors aligned with this grid, but quite often I grab a footprint by it’s center, and this moves the pads off-grid. If it was possible to turn of snapping to footprint center (In: PCB Editor / Preferences / Preferences / Editing Options / Magnetic Points), then footprints will always be grabbed by a pad and this misalignment would never occur.
In previous projects, this would also have improved productivity a bit. For example when you put a bunch of resistors in a row, and you grabbed some by a pad and some by the footprint center, then the row does not align. It is possible to turn off magnetic points for pads, but you will need to turn this on later for routing the PCB. Instead I would much rather turn of snapping to footprint centers almost always.
I am hesitant of directly creating a feature request for this, because my main motivation is related to matrix board instead of a “real PCB”, but still, I recon this function would be universal and useful enough to warrant a feature request.
Any ideas on this topic?
Maybe other use cases for when this would be useful?
Your way is absolutely opposite to my. I want to grab footprints only for their centers as pads (99% SMD) are in different offsets for each footprint.
In your case (If what you have are like DIL cases) I would set grid to 1.27mm and grab footprints for their centers.
I’m unsure related to the question feature request yes/no. If this is implemented it should also cover Piotrs workflow (which is the same as mine): switching off pads as grabbing point. So at least 3 modes should be possible:
currently implemented mode (grabbing FP by pad + anchor point + geometrical center)
new: grabbing FP by pad only
new: grabbing FP by anchor point only
But a workaround with the current possibilities: to move FP by “grabbing pads only”: switching off “Footprints” in the selection filter should help.
This is already (almost?) supported. If you turn off the pads as magnetic points then only the footprint anchor point is left. (I do not know if geometrical center is implemented).
How would that help? My intention is to move footprints, and I have to be able to select them to do that.
I don’t layout PCBs as my main work task, I do them occasionally when needed, so for me productivity is not my key driver, I’m doing prototypes or “one offs” so accuracy is more important for me. So it’s no big deal for me to first move to a pad of a footprint before attempting to move it.
If it’s hurting your productivity that much it may be hurting other users too, I see no harm in making the feature request (perhaps with some enhancements see mf_ibfeew’s post), it seems pretty logical to me.
Yes, experimented more and it works for me too, it just sounded so counter intuitive, but it does work and be usable, so I will experiment more with this in the coming days.
Edit: You can’t select a block of footprints.
When fetching a footprint with the t shortcut key, it still grabs it by it’s center, but selection and moving still works too, and I had not expected that either. I am not sure whether to consider this a bug or a feature. My expectation is that if footprints are turned off in the filter, that would mean they will just not get selected and can not move at all. My expectation is that footprints will be treated as “locked” as long as the filter is off.
I know. It was only noticing the fact and not being against your idea
I am surprised that if you switch off (in Selection Filer) Footprints but left switched on Pads you can’t grab footprint by its pad to move it.
I have tried before and it didn’t worked for me.
What is the key I probably didn’t noticed.
I place cursor at pad and press M and nothing happens.
But that’s just curiosity. I don’t need it.
A selected Pad is expanded to the complete footprint for moving/mirroring/flipping operations. Happens only if “Allow free pad operations” is disabled in the global preferences.
