kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Ing. Gabriele Oberhammer" <gabriele@...>]

Magnus Beischer wrote:

> I have another approach that might be worth looking at. One question
> we might ask is:
> - What can be done in the background (not in the GUI thread) that
> helps the user to accept long processing times?
>
> The idea is that as a user I might accept long processing times if for
> instance I can keep working immediately after I have started a zone
> fill (in a restricted way). For my own work I'd be happy if I could
> start to fill a zone, move to the next zone and start to fill that
> one, change layer and start to fill zones on that layer, take a break
> from work and come back and see that all the zones are filled in a
> beautifull way.

First of all, sorry for the late reply, I was on vacation :-)

I had already though about using a separate thread, but as others 
already stated, this would cause problems. Basically all the 
optimizations are done iterating through the linked list of zone tracks, 
so bad things could happen if you add/remove zone tracks to/from the 
list while the optimization is running in background. You can avoid this 
disabling the zone user operations during optimization, but I don't like 
this approach.

> Another idea is that as a user I might want to control in my settings
> if I want "fast zone generation", "beautiful zone edges" or "optimize
> for redrawing speed".

I agree, this should be way to go. I'm still doing some tests and trying 
some optimizations to speed it up a bit. But when the patch will be 
ready and the main developers think it's worth adding in Kicad sources, 
I'll be happy to add all the needed options to the zone properties 
dialog (or in any other better place).

We could have two approaches: do the chosen optimizations every time a 
zone is filled or apply them just once before plotting the gerbers.
It is very difficult to decide!
For small boards there is very little difference, because zone 
optimizations are fast so is worth doing it every time a zone is filled. 
But in small boards zone redrawing on the screen is fast too, so zone 
optimization will less usefull (but it will reduce file size and memory 
consumption).
For big boards more testing is needed. I work only on small boards, so 
for me is difficult to say if, for example, a zone fill which takes two 
minutes to complete is worth the faster zone screen redraw...

So now I'm separating the optimization code (the one that reduce the 
number of segments laving the final gerber zone layout the same) from 
the code that beautify (smooth) the zone margins. This way we obtain 
more flexibility and anyone would decide what is the best for every board.
Fore example on a medium board one can decide to reduce the number of 
segments every time he fills a zone and to do the margin smoothing only 
once before plotting.

Could someone send me some 'big' board for testing purposes? (only track 
and zones, no modules, etc) ?

For people working on big boards: may I assume that video.brd in the 
demos is sufficiently complex that I can use it for testing or you 
design much more complicated boards than that?


PS: I'm also working to add teardrops for pads ;-)