kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Clemens Koller <cko@xxxxxxxxx>]

Once, I had a dream...

[snippets of last threads:]
>>> I'd like to implement arbitrary pad shapes but this requires a functional 2D
>>> geometry kernel first.
>> There is already a geometry kernel in Kicad: Have a look at
>> include/geometry before writing anything.
> Indeed, there is a lightweight geometry kernel, used by the P&S. It can
> do collision detection really fast - this means improvement of the DRC &
> connectivity checking too.

...
I was dreaming of an hardware accelerated collision detection
physics engine [1] to assist P&S (as well as DRC) including 3D models.

The other dream was to hit a single button in my design
tool to run an area minimization of a fully routed board by
modeling the PCB traces as rubber bands pulling all non-protected
components together to one high density blob as much as the
design rules/collision detection allows.

These dreams became reality in open source software first.

Regards,

Clemens

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_%28software%29