I’d love to see bus routing, routing auto complete, and support for circular coordinate routing.
“Routing auto complete”… Is that similar to the f hotkey, which finishes a track when pressed during routing to the nearest pad?
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Find similar objects - yes please
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What I meant was . . if you use some proper version control system with local and remote repositories you are more protected against losses.
I am hoping we’ll get the ability to import OrCad Capture schematics and libraries. I understand there is an open-source project to reverse engineer DSN and LIB files and create a parser. We have a legacy of maybe 20 years of old OrCAD Capture designs which mean we have to maintain the Cadence tools. A reliable import tool would create a viable upgrade path to KiCAD and be another step forwards toward migration.
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Hi,
A couple of ideas that struck me today in frustration more than anything else…
Popup window behavior, they often open partially off screen, don’t have full screen controls or scroll bars, all this means you need to faff around resizing them to read them of do the intended function.
Open them fully on screen at a useful size.
Every time I click a mouse button I get a popup that I need to close - infuriating could we have some sort of click control?
Thanks
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I’ve installed V9.03, So I know it still is on my wish list.
I went through the 250+ wish list items, many are advanced features that are already in version V9.xx as some have pointed out.
Minor wish… in the PCB editor, when I got to generate the fabrication output, POS specifically. I’d really like a means to select the fields and sequence in the POS file such that I don’t have re-edit the POS files before submitting to various board fabricators. Enhance so it’s sort of like BOM in schematic editor so I can drop off fields… one way to do that is to add a tab for fabrication settings in the BOARD SETUP process such that I can have pre-saved templates for the POS files.
Incidentally currently the generate POS process doesn’t remember if I’d selected items or not for placement…specifically sometimes you have to “unclick” the selections pre-assigned in generate POS - and those settings are not remembered for that board.
As I said, minor - but most of the items for v10 wish lists have already been either incorporated or requested.
This has been requested before in earlier versions of KiCAD, but I will repeat…
When importing the netlist from the schematic to the PCB the first time. Create multiple clumped “rats nest” based on the sheets - instead of clumping them all together in “super rats nest”
Eg. I I used a sheet for “power supply” the parts on that sheet should be in a rats nest cluster of their own.
Where it saves time is when you put lots of bypass caps near chips - the current rats nests import process doesn’t keep those bypass caps close to the other parts for the “power supply”, or which ever sheet you work on.
This means manually separating them out and regrouping them by hand. If they are kept in clusters related to the sheets. I could click on a cluster - drag that cluster to the PCB outline and then start spreading them out before routing begins…
I’m on v9.xx (now 9.03) so it’s still an issue. nice for 10.x
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Have you tried using the Pack and Move Footprints (P) feature? This allows to regroup related parts very fast.
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My company is still using OrCad 17.2, and everyone is desperate to switch out to kicad or altium, an easy and reliable kicad project convert would go a long way to convince the higher ups to finally switch.
I was following the progress on a kicad allegro importer, tried the nightly version with the experimental importer, and it worked pretty well, but for some reason it got reverted and every commit related to it got deleted, pretty sad.
Is that bought software, or subscription based? Have you thought about what 2 or 3 years of subscription to the current software costs for all the people in your company? For KiCad, you can get a lot of personal attention for that sort of money. You can contact https://www.kipro-pcb.com/ to discuss options for sponsoring priority development.
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It’s bought, otherwise I think the choice of switching would’ve been made earlier.
Pretty sure I’ve talked to my boss about kipro, definitely a good program, hoping I can convince them some day.
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But the rats nest parts like the bypass caps, get intermingled. If they are clustered by sheet, I can just highlight the cluster and move to the area of the board that I want them to end up, That means I’m not going through the laid out PCB and manually moving caps from one side of the laid out board to the other - because I’d put C1 with U13, instead of U1 etc.
Remember the parts had already been organized by groupings on the sheets. If it requires clicking and marking individual parts on large “super rats nest” before moving - that’s a lot of steps.
I came here to ask about EMI/EMC, field coupling and so on. It’s one of the few things that Altium has that I could really use (and I’m sure anyone who cares about signal integrity should – and by anyone, I really mean anyone).
It’s really tough to model parasitics accurately on paper and a “heat map” showing (for instance) coupling could be a killer feature. I can work them on with paper, calculator and Saturn PCB tools but that’s a huge amount for every single trace.
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That makes it simple then:
- Open both schematic and PCB via the project manager.
- Draw a nice (or an ugly) box around the capacitors on the schematic.
- Right click on the PCB editor, and select Pack and Move Footprints [P] from the context menu.
Alternatively (my preferred method) Activate the PCB editor by hovering the mouse over it and then rotate the scroll wheel (one click or back and forth). This transfers focus to the PCB editor with minimal side effects (Can also be done with Keyboard shortcuts). And once the PCB editor has focus, press P to Pack and Move.
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I’m coming from Orcad/PADS. While it’s certainly not easy/reliable, there’s a clumsy path to import both Orcad schematics and PADS layout into KiCad that involves a trip through EasyEDA. In case you didn’t know. I did most of my migrating the old-fashion way (pretty much redo it all manually) before I found out the path through EasyEDA.
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I tried that, and wow - it is not at all obvious.
I don’t believe that’s in any of the help or online files…
Yup, I’ve tried it, it kinda works but it’s definitely a very roundabout way of doing it.
I also don’t like how it keeps easyeda symbols and fonts.
Also I’m wondering about the safety aspect of pushing company-made cards to the Chinese cloud.