kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Miguel Ángel Ajo <majopela@xxxxxxxxxx>]

About using mm as the default unit, other people may disagree, we should provide
facilities to let people specify their unit.


On Friday, 16 de January de 2015 at 18:30, LordBlick wrote:

> In response to a message written on 16.01.2015, 18:10, from Piers Titus van der  
> Torren:
> > About units: For me it was a big benefit to be able to just use any 2 element
> > tuple like object for coordinates and sizes, and direct numbers for other
> > values, and not having to use a conversion to internal units all the time. I do
> > a lot of my calculations with numpy, so it makes things a lot easier if numpy
> > arrays can be used directly.
> > To me it makes most sense to use mm as default unit for the python API, and
> > convert from inches to mm using a simple inch2mm function.
> >  
>  
> Why not use KiCAD internal units ?
>  
>  

I would hold internally the IUs, I agree. But that should only be internal,  
or accessible via .to_iu / .from_iu if we wanted…

The user shouldn’t need to know what an IU is unless he really wants, for some
reason.
  
> Any necessary geometric calculation can be  
> implemented in compiled _pcbnew.so
> Also we can look onto Cython…
>  
>  

We may reuse any logic that it’s already provided by the pcbnew classes,
and sometimes we can even extend them (if there is an evident bottleneck).  
  
> >  
> > Furthermore I put my script in a github repository, like Wayne suggested, I hope
> > this leads to more organized experimenting, please clone and improve. It can be
> > found at https://github.com/pierstitus/kicad-python
> >  
> > LordBlick, thanks for another improvement to the layer conversion, it is much
> > better to use the names that are used in the GUI ('F.Cu' instead of 'F_Cu').
> >  
>  
> As Jean-Pierre Charras wrote in thread nearly, board names for cooper layers may  
> vary:
> brd = pcbnew
> pcb = brd.GetBoard()
> >>> pcb.SetLayerName(0, 'Top')
> True
> >>> pcb.SetLayerName(31, 'Bottom')
> True
> >>> pcb.SetLayerName(32, 'BottomGlue')
> False
> >>>
>  
>  


Hmm, that’s an important point for not referencing layers by names dynamically,
(I was proposing that too)

may be we should be defining a set of 32 constants for the layers we can reference
and keep up to date with any ID changes at the C++ side. Although I suppose ID’s are not
going to change for compatibility reasons.
>  
> > It's committed to the github repo above.
> Thank you for cooperate… :)
>  
>  


Thank you Piers, it’s actually an awesome start point.  
>  
> --  
> Best Regards,
> LordBlick
>  
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