kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[José Ignacio <jose.cyborg@xxxxxxxxx>]

It is a nice feature when you're laying out a board that has mixed
metric and imperial footprints, you can line up the grids at a given
point in the board instead of having it handed to you randomly
depending on where you start drawing the outline. Say you have a 0.1"
pitch header and you want to put a part exactly 5 mm right of the last
pin you can set the grid origin to that last pin, use a 1mm grid and
put your part 5 squares to the right.

Cheers.

On Wed, Dec 9, 2015 at 11:59 AM, Andy Peters <devel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Can someone please definitively explain the purpose of the Grid Origin in pcbnew? This comes up on the user list and Kicad.info forums regularly.
>
> Coordinate (0,0) is always defined as the upper left corner of the sheet on which the PCB is “drawn.” This origin is outside of the normal drawing area. I am looking at a layout I am working on now, and I put the “grid origin” in the upper-left corner of the board edge, which is at (25, 50) (in millimeters). We can move the “Grid Origin” to anywhere on the sheet, but exactly what does it do and why is it needed?
>
> The description in the pcbnew manual is:
>
> “Grid origin. (grid offset). Useful for placement of pads. The grid origin can be put on a given location (the first pad to place), and after the grid size can be set to the pad pitch. Placing pads is therefore very easy.” This would imply that it is wholly irrelevant for layout, and only useful in the footprint editor.
>
> I am glad to update the docs with a more cogent description, but I (and obviously many other users) don’t understand it at all.
>
> Thanks.
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