(V6) Change from inches back to mils?

With the move to V6 the base imperial unit changed from mil to inches. This is not the industry standard and is awkward for design. Is there some way to change from inches back to mils? I can’t see anything in the options.

3 Likes

inches makes sense when dimensioning a board and mounting holes… :wink: As @JeffYoung showed, changing viewed units is as simple as the three unit radio buttons in the left-hand toolbar.

What did surprise me when installing v6 and accepting default settings was the schematic units defaulted to metric, where the de-facto grid of the provided libraries is imperial… Not a huge thing, but just felt a little odd.

1 Like

No it doesn’t.
Inches and derived units have been obsolete ever since that horrible unit was defined as 25.4mm.
That has been some 90 or more years ago.

And still, when I go buy a new lathe here in the mainland of the EU, I have to be carefull that both the dials are in metric, and the thread that is underneath those dials is in metric.
I’m guessing that that *&^%$#@! costs billions of monetary units yearly.

I do admit I sometimes use a 2.54mm grid on my PCB, because it lines up some connectors with hobby PCB’s that have holes in a square pattern.

Yes it is a huge thing.
Yet again an improvement in KiCad :slight_smile:
Ok, maybe not “huge”, but an improvement none the less.

1 Like

That has not been true since the industry migrated to SMD
KiCad offers all dimension options anway

Sorry, I didn’t provide context… Here in the BSA (Backwards States of America) where imperial measurements are common, and in the context of the original question (asking for imperial mils vs. imperial inches), inches are more suitable to dimensioning board outlines and mounting hole locations instead of dimensioning those in mils…

:roll_eyes:

Lol. I’d actually advocate to dropping inches, mils, mm, furlongs, chains, etc. for schematics and just have a single “drawing unit” that just happens to be based on inches/mils to match the provided symbol library geometry of 0.1 and 0.05 drawing units, or 100 and 50 drawing units (depending on where the decimal place is). Yes 6.0 has snap to start drawing a wire, the snap to finish drawing a wire doesn’t exist yet (or at least not that I’ve found). Just look at all the issues beginners have connecting wires and pins.

I wouldn’t even mind if the drawing units were based on whole milimeters except that the entire set of libraries would need to be re-drawn/scaled and loading legacy schematics for editing would be problematic.

Man, I feel dumb. Thanks!

To be clear, I was talking about the industry standard in the US, which I know isn’t the whole world. But even many of the PCB manufacturers in China still list minimum trace widths and clearances in mil. Like it or not, it is still very common.

Hey Wait! What??? :laughing:

Seriously speaking, in pcb layout I think we all need to be bilingual between (inches and mils) and metric. DIPs and some other components are in inches, while so many others are metric.

As an aside…if I want to know the outdoor temperature, I want it in Fahrenheit. But if I am measuring the temperature of an electronic component on my board, I want Celsius.

That has indeed been an issue for a long time.
Recently I fiddled with a schematic from someone who made a mess of the grid.
On his schematic made a selection, Right Clicked and I saw an Align Elements to Grid in the context popup menu. So I selected the whole schematic, used that function and saw everything move a little bit, and everything was on-grid.

1 Like

Open your KICAD and check this when you get to 3D design layout it will help you out.
Thanks

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.