kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Orson,

Thanks much for your feedback and news about plans for eeschema.
I agree that having a common codebase for selection filtering and object
inspection across the tools is a great idea (especially since the roadmap
has plans for eventually combining the tools more than they are today).

By "intelligent autorouter" in schematic editor, I meant that some of the
high-end commercial tools have nicer ways to input wires and buses that act
somewhat like an autorouter would for a PCB, meaning there are certain
rules that can be set about how wires/buses should look (i.e. must be H/V,
must not overlap existing wires, etc), and if you are drawing new wires in
"auto" mode, you can simply pick two points to wire between (i.e. two pins,
or a pin and existing wire, etc) and the program will draw a wire between
them that meets the rules if possible.

Of course this requires some tuning and tweaking to be user-friendly,
because the constraints are different -- a PCB autorouter can fail and tell
the user it isn't possible to route a net.  The schematic wire "autorouter"
must always place a trace, and the "autorouting" is about making it
visually the "best" looking.

I have some more concrete examples in my head, and I think I will try to
put together some examples to show more about what I mean and how my
proposal would work in eeschema.  But basically, I think we can get a lot
closer to the designer saying "I want to connect X to Y" and having to
spend minimal mental energy on picking each corner of the wire, much like
the P&S router is designed to reduce mental energy of routing the PCB.

Best,
Jon

On Thu, Dec 1, 2016 at 10:28 AM, Maciej Sumiński <maciej.suminski@xxxxxxx>
wrote:

> Hi Jon,
>
> We really appreciate your offer. I am quite positive that most of people
> here would admit that KiCad begs for some UX improvements.
>
> GALifying eeschema is going to be a significant refactor, but it will
> not happen before v5 release, which is currently planned for Feb 2017.
>
> IIRC Wayne works on the new file format. I have in my stash some changes
> to the symbol library editor (I hope to publish them soon for testing).
> The on-going work does not seem to collide with your proposal, unless
> there are other plans I am not aware about.
>
> During a recent KiCad hackathon [1] Oswaldo has volunteered [2] to work
> on the Selection Filter for pcbnew. I wonder if it would be possible to
> write code generic enough to handle schematic & layout editors or at
> least have a common base. Combined with the Object Inspector, which is
> also supposed to work with eeschema at one point, it creates a really
> powerful toolset.
>
> Would you elaborate on the "intelligent autorouter" idea?
>
> Regards,
> Orson
>
> 1. http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki/Hackathon-ehal
> 2. https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg26722.html
>
> On 12/01/2016 02:54 AM, Jon Evans wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I am an EE and sometimes software developer who has wanted to contribute
> to
> > KiCad for a while and finally might have some time to do things.  I am
> kind
> > of excited about UI/UX improvement possibilities, and have been
> compiling a
> > list of things that I might want to work on at some point or at least
> just
> > poke at to get familiar with the codebase.
> >
> > I know a big refactor of eeschema is planned/in progress.  Can the people
> > working on that please advise whether it makes sense for me to work on
> any
> > of the things in the following list, or if it would be likely to be
> wasted
> > effort based on what will likely change in the refactor?
> >
> > - Improvements to wire / bus routing: several bugs here and also some
> > wishlist items (H/V restriction working in drag mode,
> > auto-connection/junction creation at points on a wire that aren't the
> > endpoints, "intelligent autorouter" for schematic wires, fix wires after
> > drag, etc)
> > - Selection filtering (select anything vs. only components, wires, text,
> > etc)
> > - Color system improvements -- arbitrary color picker, color themes, etc.
> > - Drag selection mode option -- select anything touching vs. select
> things
> > completely enclosed by drag area
> >
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Jon
>
>
>