Hi all,
While I am experienced in PCB design, I’m new to KiCad (migrated from Eagle due to the Autodesk policy). Fine tool I immediately felt comfortable with. I highly appreciate the effort the teams throws in in their spare time.
Now to business: the autoplacement works all right, placing the parts at your currently active grid. Fine.
“Spread out all footprints” seems to ignore the grid, so you end up with components being placed at, say 10.21351709/2.221456654 (real example). While standards allow for 2 thou (in effect it is 0,05mm metric), this is in the nano category. In my experience, however, sticking to a placement grid which evenly divides 100 thou (like 10, 5, 2, 1 thou) is best practice regarding manufacturability.
How come? Did I get something wrong?
Spread out all footprints is just a function to separate them for you in a manner so you can pick them up easily and place them how you want it.
If you pick them up one by one, upon release they will be sitting on the grid again.
So really no problem, unless you create the layout from how the spread out all footprints function placed them.
2 Likes
Autoplacement and spread out foot prints have completely different functions. Spread out simply and rapidly avoids the stack of new parts on top of each other when a netlist is imported. If you have had to patiently click on a stack and select which of 50 resistors you want to move you will understand why auto-spread is such a time saver.
Autoplacement actually attempts to fit the parts on the board and will only do a decent job if you have spent a lot of time describing track weightings - this is a job skilled humans still do much better