kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Gabriele Oberhammer <gabriele@...>]

I wrote a small patch for starting to address this issue.
You can look at the results on this images, where the *_ORIG images are 
generated using Kicad SVN 1241 and the corresponding *_SMOOTH images are 
generated with the patched version. The board used for the screenshots 
is pic_programmer.brd from the demos:

http://www.naustech.com/kicad/test_1_ORIG.png
http://www.naustech.com/kicad/test_1_SMOOTH.png
http://www.naustech.com/kicad/test_2_ORIG.png
http://www.naustech.com/kicad/test_2_SMOOTH.png
http://www.naustech.com/kicad/test_3_ORIG.png
http://www.naustech.com/kicad/test_3_SMOOTH.png
http://www.naustech.com/kicad/test_4_ORIG.png
http://www.naustech.com/kicad/test_4_SMOOTH.png

(Sorry, but I did not had the time to set up a proper html page :-) )

What the patch basically does is to connect every start/end point of a 
zone track to any other start/end point nearer than 'g_GridRoutingSize'

If you find it useful, I can post the patch in few days (after modifying 
it to obey Kicad coding standards).

General considerations:

- this is my first patch to Kicad, so be gentle... :-)

- we can achieve good results with 45degree zones and with box-shaped 
regions

- with circular regions (like the ones around pads and thermals) its 
difficult to say if the result is better (i.e. more 'professional') or 
worse then the unpatched version

- pheraps we could achieve better results if we permit to the zone 
tracks to overlay for 1/2, like you can see in the images from 
http://beischer.com/opencad/fillzone.htm

- it adds a lot of small tracks to the zone (I'll do more test to figure 
out how many more in percentage)

- it is quite slow, so it would be better to use this function only 
once, just before plotting the gerbers

- as far as I can see, there should be no worries regarding wrong 
connections (i.e. connecting zones that should not be connected) if 
'g_Grid_RoutingSize' is smaller then the clearance. I've run the DRC 
several times and with different fill grid sizes without finding any 
problem...

Best regards, Gabriele