kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 01/06/2011 04:28 PM, Karl Schmidt wrote:
> 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.

Sounds like the foundation of a workable concept.

Dick