kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Moses O McKnight <moses@...>]

Hi Dick,

Thanks for looking at it.

> These questions are not clear:
> 
> 
> 1) if both boards have perimeters, which board's perimeter is retained?

I would think the page settings of the current board would be retained,
but the perimeter of each board would be retained as it currently is (if
by perimeter you mean Edges_Pcb).

> 2) if both boards are located in the same position before the merge, how 
> is one supposed to arrange them into separate areas of the merged-board 
> since it seems impossible to select only a single board if they are 
> overlapped?

I first moved the current board out of the way and then imported the new
board. One thought I had is to load the board into a separate board
object which would be an object on the main board and could be selected
and moved as a whole. I don't know how hard that would be to implement
though.

> 3) Should not a pre-load coordinate offset be adhered to so that the 2nd 
> board can be loaded directly to a new position?

Good idea.

> 4) what about duplicate component names, duplicate net names? How is 
> one supposed to search for these components after the merge if there is 
> possibly more than one of them?

Either rename the nets and components on the appended board, or create a
new board object as I mentioned above.

> 5) what is to be done if there are a different number of layers in the 
> two boards, abort the merge?

Offhand I would say abort the merge, because I don't believe you could
panelize boards with different numbers of of layers anyhow. Alternately
maybe we could pop up a message box warning the user and asking what to
do.

> 6) should it still be possible to reload the netlist of either board 
> after the merge?

If the new board is loaded as a new board object, then reloading the
netlist for each board independently should not be a problem. If that
is too much of a problem then I would say it should not be possible to
reload the netlist after appending a board.

> Sorry, I tried to help but my original email was not responded to in 
> sufficient detail. Perhaps someone who has a use for this feature can 
> do the work.
> 
> 
> Dick

My problem right now is that kicad is the first and only PCB layout or
schematic capture software that I've used, and I'm new at board layout
so I don't have a real good frame of reference for how things should
work in order to give better detail. I just knew that the append board
feature could be better.

Since I do have an interest in this working and apparently so does
Alain, I may try and work on it. Alain mentioned that one benefit of
appending boards in pcbnew instead of in the gerber viewer is that he
can add locating holes and make other changes.

Thanks,
Moses