kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Maciej Sumiński <maciej.suminski@xxxxxxx>]

On 04/11/2014 06:44 PM, Pierre Parent wrote:
> 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.

Hi Pierre,

I have seen your work presented in the bug report that you have created 
before. It looks quite impressive, it is great to have more people 
working on KiCad. I think the best way would be to integrate your code 
with the Push and Shove router.
Currently, the microwave toolbox is not ported to the Tool Framework, 
but all the other tools are already there. If you would like to have a 
look on the code, the most interesting places are in the branch 
lp:~cern-kicad/kicad/drawing_tool:
- the Tool Framework itself is located in common/tool
- tools for pcbnew are in pcbnew/tools
An example of initial steps to create a tool is available here:
https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~cern-kicad/kicad/drawing_tool/revision/4667. 
If you need any help writing the tool using the framework, please do not 
hesitate to ask - we are glad to help.
I have started writing a tutorial on creating new tools using the Tool 
Framework, but then I realized that there are still ongoing changes and 
it could become obsolete too early. Maybe now it is the right time to 
finish it.

Regards,
Orson