kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Pierre Parent <pierre.parent@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Im' new here. My name is Pierre. I've started to develop for kicad a tool for 
trace length tunning.

Trace length tunning is an important tool which is lacking when designing more 
complex boards in particular board with DDR/DDR2/DDR3 ram. For example the 
board olinuxino imx 233 maxi, which is open hardware uses length tunned traces 
in Eagle. It is currently completely impossible to do similar thing with kicad 
even when spending lot of time on it.

A bug was filled by other users: https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad/+bug/594089

So my initial development was to stop the bleeding, and obviously it is very 
early version which can largely be improved in usability. Though for my use it 
is already suitable for DDR ram routing. Here are first 
results:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWJyGpkZ6k4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdQ-2EnWNkw

I would appreciate any feedback, and advice. Do you think I should do a branch 
with my code (still buggy)? Also I think it would be nice to get it working 
with new component view, I don't think it would be hard. Has the microwave 
toolbox started to be ported? (it would give me an example).

I think it would be good to make sure a length tunning tool (even minimal) is 
available in next kicad release, because it simply prevents to use kicad to 
design certain kind of boards.

Pierre.