kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Lorenzo Marcantonio <l.marcantonio@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 01:19:16AM -0800, Rick Walker wrote:
> I'd hate to see kicad lose it's current ability to fully control all the
> annular rings in a padstack independently through the textual
> description file. 

I too vote to retain the bitmask approach. Why not simply use a layer
list (partly fixed, partly customizable) and a mask of layer to apply?

For example ATM we have:
0 Copper Side A
...
15 Copper Side B
16..31 Tech/doc layers of various nature.

These could be defined in a table in the header and then we could refer
them to bitmask (big as needed). 

I agree that this would be problematic when modifying the layer list, so
here's proposal #2 (the lisp way)

Associate a symbol to each layer 
copper-0 Copper side a
copper-1 Copper side b
silk-top
silk-bottom

and so on

In the external representation save masks as list sets
(pad :layers (copper-0 copper-1 mask-top mask-bottom)) ... )

(I used keyword syntax since I don't remember how kicad sexps work:D)

There could be different way to handle this in core (from actual sets,
to numbering symbols and using them to index masks) but at least the
external representation would be stable and useful... complexity when
editing the layer table would vary obviously (and so general performance:P)

-- 
Lorenzo Marcantonio
Logos Srl

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