kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Karl Schmidt <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As I was placing a new board in PCB it occurred to me that there is a better way to do this.

What If the initial placement in PCBnew is based on the location of the components on the schematic 
in eeschema instead of stacked all on top of each other?

Parts close to each other in the schematic tend to be close to each other on the PCB - so this seems 
it would be a time saver.  (Particularly on SMD work the placement tends to echo the schematic 
layout ).

I've used the auto-place, but not with very helpful results. I'm wondering if the auto-place might 
work better with this initial placement idea?  Seems like it would be pretty easy to implement - 
just pulling the placement from eeschema - perhaps multiplying the coordinates by some constant. If 
nothing else it helps one pick up one part from many.

If you wanted to make it a bit more complicated, one could support multiple sheets by adding an x-y 
offset for each sheet.

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Karl Schmidt                                  EMail Karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Transtronics, Inc.                              WEB http://xtronics.com
3209 West 9th Street                             Ph (785) 841-3089
Lawrence, KS 66049                              FAX (785) 841-0434

Wealth is generated by people pursuing exchanges in their
self interest. In a free market, no exchange takes place
unless both parties think they benefit.
This is called greed by some. kps

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