Weird behaviour of snap to grid

Layout
1

I need to place components to matrix positions.

  • Set User grid size to 18.8mm (both X and Y), and origin 9.4; 9.4
  • Grid dropdown is set to User grid
  • pick the anchor of a omponent and push M to move
  • snapping to grid works fine while on free area, but footprint can be placed to non-grid positions while close to other components. (see attached video)

GAL mode,
Application: kicad
Version: (2016-12-22 revision d365dc5)-makepkg, release build
Libraries: wxWidgets 3.0.2
libcurl/7.46.0 OpenSSL/1.0.2d zlib/1.2.8 libidn/1.32 libssh2/1.6.0 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Windows 7 (build 7601, Service Pack 1), 64-bit edition, 64 bit, Little endian, wxMSW

2

I believe it snaps to features of the stationary footprint?

I noticed earlier that when selecting to move a component, the cross hair sometimes centers on a pad or something other than the origin of the footprint being moved.

Both of these functionalities are new to me. I think I will probably be both praising and cursing them for a while before I get used to them =)

3

To elaborate a bit more.

It’s like the magnetic pads function kicks in while using the move tool. I see a potential danger with that. When absolute component placement is critical it could easily happen that one gets misaligned by mistake. The benefit I could see would be the possibility to re-position the grid origin on the fly without dropping the component being moved. But that’s kind of a stretch. It should preferably be configurable.

The other feature, grabbing a component by a pad I see much more potential in. Without it positioning a particular pad of a component on the grid has always been a bit of a chore… I also imagine it will be more obvious that the component isn’t picked up by its origin, and mistakes should be less likely to happen.

As far as I can tell the snapping applies to pads and trace nodes. And footprints can be picked up by origin and pads only.

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