Are there any plans on switching default grid from 0.050” to a mm based grid?
The reason that I’m asking is that as I understand it the Eeschema file format has recently changed from inch to mm units, and lots of mm grids has been added to the grid list in View => Grid Properties… (after I pressed a Reset button that then disappeared).
I’m in the planning stage of somehow importing symbols from another application (TinyCAD.net), and this application unfortunately uses a default grid of 2 mm. I’m not sure about the effects of simply adding a 1.27 multiplier in the conversion process.
Does anyone have experience in symbol/schematic conversion from mm to inch?
Other schematic capture software (like ECS, whose file format LTspice uses) is using coordinates relative to a configurable “internal grid size”, which could then conform both to US, and EU or international standards.
One could say, KiCad 5 could have also been viewed this way (coordinate units are 1/100 or 1% of an “internal grid size” of 0.1", which would translate to mil). So one could have used a mechanism to change that “internal grid size” from 0.1" = 2.54mm to 2.50mm, for display and printing purposes only.
Unfortunately, the new schematic file format was shoehorned into following the pcbnew file format, which (currently) uses a fixed metric measure only. On the other hand, snapping wires allow to now use metric and imperial symbols together (for those who don’t care about standards).
Currently, I would convert each 2mm to 100 (or to 50 or to 200, if necessary) in the old KiCad 5 schematic file format, and let KiCad 5.99 do the conversion to the new format, until they have it sorted out and fully documented…
Thank you for the detailed answer! We’ll do some tests and see how it turns out. It does sound fairly promising at least.
I did try to connect wires between two symbols, one from the default libs and one which used 2 mm grid, but Eeschema didn’t want to connect the wires to the symbol which was not on the current grid. I used a nightly buil of 5.99 from about 5 days ago. But maybe there’s some setting I must enable? Nevertheless, I don’t like the idea of not following a grid standard for symbols and having a mix of two completely different ones.