kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Piotr Esden-Tempski <piotr@xxxxxxxxx>]

I personally would love to see bezier/spline support in KiCad. When seeing PCB designs by people like Boldport one wishes the “normal” engineering tools would support “organic" traces too. Obviously due to the limitations of the Gerber file format circle approximation would be necessary. If that also makes DRC easier to implement it would be a plus too. I bet many others that see EE board design as more than just a boring engineering task and more as a creative art would appreciate this feature. That would propel KiCad beyond Eagle that supports arc traces (not supported by KiCad drawing tools at the moment, and has to be hand drawn using single segments). So please consider adding bezier or splines instead of removing them.

Cheers,
Piotr

> On Sep 14, 2016, at 5:37 AM, Nick Østergaard <oe.nick@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Yes, of course arcs are more important. But Cirilo mentioned that one
> could use arcs to appromimate the beiziers for DRC and gerber
> generation purposes
> 
> 2016-09-14 13:44 GMT+02:00 José Ignacio <jose.cyborg@xxxxxxxxx>:
>> I don't see length matching splines to be any easier than length
>> matching polylines. If anything having arcs is a lot more important
>> than beziers as arcs can form circles while beziers can't exactly (you
>> need NURBS for that). Also iirc Gerbers support arcs natively so it
>> would end up generating better output.
>> 
>> On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 6:16 AM, Simon Wells <swel024@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> i have no idea whether it is actually valid but could/would bezier
>>> curves be used in differential pairs that are also length matched? so
>>> that it would keep the seperation for the differential but would also
>>> allow the lengths to be equal?
>>> 
>>> On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 10:51 PM, jp charras <jp.charras@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>> On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 7:44 PM, Nick Østergaard <oe.nick@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:oe.nick@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>    For some RF applications people would like to use curves for traces. So DRC support for
>>>>>    beizier/arcs would be nice here.
>>>> 
>>>> I perfectly understand the interest of arcs in traces.
>>>> 
>>>> But what the interest of Bezier curves in traces or shapes on copper layers ?
>>>> 
>>>> I am not a microwave specialist, however I never saw cases where Bezier curves are needed.
>>>> 
>>>> The more complex case I know is a filter, which works fine with polygons (seen demos/microwave).
>>>> 
>>>> AFAIK, complex shapes are generated by specialized tools (you cannot easily draw them by hand).
>>>> Are they generating shapes with Bezier curves.
>>>> 
>>>> Moreover, remember Gerber format does not support Bezier curves, so they will be converted to
>>>> polygons if they are supported by Pcbnew.
>>>> 
>>>> --
>>>> Jean-Pierre CHARRAS
>>>> 
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