kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@...>]

I would not want to accept this patch, or any like it. However, we 
could put it into the repository for future use.

My concern:
Zone filling and drawing is way too slow now. This patch would affect 
the basic drawing on screen of zones also I presume.

I have some very elaborate boards for which it takes 3 minutes to fill 
zones even on a fast computer. It takes 2 seconds to draw these boards 
on screen onces the zones rasters are in place, again on a fast computer.

I cannot tolerate any slower zone drawings.

If and when we move the zone raster generation to the gerber generation 
process/step, then an improvement like this would be worth considering.

Until then, perhaps the electrons will not complain about their 
playground having a ragged fence around it.


Dick


> 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
>
>
>
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